Hilary Hahn. Courtesy of the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra.
This weekend, the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra will welcome back the violinist Hilary Hahn to open the 2023-2024 season with Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto at Stifel Theatre on September 23 at 7:30 p.m. and September 24 at 3:00 p.m.
More than two decades ago, when Hahn last shared the stage with the SLSO, the internationally celebrated soloist was still in the process of recording her first album with the classical label Deutsche Grammophon. Now a three-time Grammy Award winner and Musical America’s 2023 “Artist of the Year,”Hahn is currently artist-in-residence at both the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and London’s Wigmore Hall. She is a prolific recording artist and commissioner of new works, with 22 feature recordings to date, including her latest album, a celebration of the centenary of the Six Sonatas by the Belgian composer Eugéne Ysaÿe.
Ahead of her performance, we chatted with Hahn about the upcoming SLSO program, her career in music, and the popular reception of a social media initiative she began in 2017 to demystify the process and discipline of practice.
In the world of Instagram practice accounts, you’ve brought together a far-flung community of musicians through #100daysofpractice, with students and fans having contributed more than 800,000 posts under the hashtag.
I believe I’m the original practice account! It was a revelation for people when I started posting my unstaged and un-fancy practice. I truly didn’t think it would be interesting to anyone. I only began it because I wanted to join in on a visual artists’ project on Instagram, in which creatives showed the process rather than the result. My version of that was practice.
What I realized in that first season was that there are many taboos around practice. We rarely see or hear musicians in the midst of preparation, but we all do a lot of work on our own in the practice room. Without any external frame of reference, it’s sometimes hard to break out of your own repetitive groove. I’ve concluded that practicing is the place where you’re completely free to explore, where other peoples’ expectations don’t dictate what you’re trying to do. I think it’s important to emerge from the practice room ready for many different circumstances.
Part of the beauty of daily practice is that every day is different, so if you’re working on the same thing every day, or if you’re working on different things on different days, you’ll be pretty prepared for the variability of life as it applies to performance. Make some progress every day, stay open to your own ideas and be gentle with yourself. You don’t have to get results in every part of your work every day.
One of the major goals of Powell Hall’s current renovation project is to provide greater access to music across St. Louis, and its expansion will include a new Learning and Education Center that will enhance the quality of community programs that the SLSO is able to offer. How does community engagement figure into your work as an artist-in-residence?
If you follow your own curiosities and stay aware, you will likely wind up at some point developing an initiative that you’re passionate about that fills a gap in your field. It’s challenging to prescribe outreach. Anything done inauthentically feels inauthentic. When an orchestra understands its city and wants to make a difference, it’s really interesting to see how a large organization can act like a single artist, and how large programs can have personal effects. Every place is different, every city has a different landscape and every arts organization has a different place in that landscape.
As for me, I look for things that I have some knowledge about. Situations in which I’ve wished something existed, or situations in which something that I believe in doesn’t exist yet. I’m always looking at the human experience within art, and I’m also interested in the intersection of creativity and access. Who has access and why? It’s a simple question, but to really understand it, you have to take a lot of time and remove your assumptions from the equation.
This year, SLSO’s season opener will include your performance of Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto, which you first recorded in 2002. What have you discovered about the piece, the beauty and demands of its form, as you’ve played it over the years?
There’s a singing quality to the Mendelssohn concerto that is really charming. It’s also emotionally wrenching. Playing inside of the layers of emotional and rhythmic momentum is what’s really engrossing for me about this concerto. A lot of people learn it while they’re still students, so it’s a piece that travels with violinists throughout their lives.
The shapes of the phrases can mean different things as you gain experience with other pieces in the repertoire, and it’s an interesting piece in the history of concerti. On the one hand, it has a relatively traditional structure of three movements of varying tempi and mood. On the other hand, it morphs expectations; for example, when the tutti introduction is so short and doesn’t include themes, or when the composer writes his own cadenza, or in the ways the third movement interacts with various highlighted instruments in the orchestra. The second movement is also a bit unusual, in that the middle section is so drastically different from the rest.
None of this is that important to the listener, because each listener will have their own history with the piece, and everyone should stay open to what that day’s performance will bring. As a player, though, all of your experiences over the years add up, and playing within your memories and your new ideas is a fascinating journey.
What was the joy of returning to Ysaÿe’s sonatas in your latest album? How have his works accompanied you since you began playing them?
Somehow, over the years, whether I was playing these sonatas or not, they became part of me in a new way. I think it’s related to my contemporary music commissions, including the Partitas by Antón García Abril, and to my solo Bach recitals that I’ve been touring. I’ve learned to read between the lines in my own way. As I was recording, I was digging into the score for my sense of the inside stories within the writing. Sometimes self-trust is the hardest thing for a musician, but in my opinion, these pieces only communicate if the performer trusts their own instincts.
I’m so interested in the breadth of your recent collaborations: Michael Abels, who composed your Grammy-nominated Isolation Variation, and the Frankfurt Radio Symphony, with whom you recorded Eclipse, both come to mind. What pleasure do you take from the diversity of your musical partnerships?
I always look forward to working with musicians who know very clearly who they are. When someone is truly comfortable with themselves and is open to their colleagues, the music can be a true conversation. I like hearing different musical perspectives. When a musical partnership works, I explore it with a variety of repertoire. I’ve also been going deeper into the solo repertoire to explore composers’ concepts of the violin. At the same time, I’m intrigued by new collaborations, because you never know when you’re going to meet a complementary voice.
I think frequently about the shifts in humanity over the centuries, whether it’s from migration, exclusion, interest or reparation. The arts provide a way to look at these shifts. If we notice not just what we are exposed to in the arts, but what we’re not exposed to, we can learn a lot about ourselves and our contexts.
I’m looking forward to my season, because I’m working on a lot of repertoire from different places and centuries and playing with varying formations of ensembles, even within the same program. My colleagues in the next two months span at least five continents of origin. I feel so lucky to be in a profession where we have the opportunity to join perspectives on a global and timeless level.
