AboutHilary Hahn
Violinist and three-time Grammy winner Hilary Hahn combines expressive musicality and masterful technique with a diverse repertoire driven by artistic curiosity. With her open-minded approach to classical music and her desire to share her musical experiences with a global community, she has amassed a large following.
Hilary Hahn is a strong advocate for new music and has commissioned works from a wide range of contemporary composers. She has premiered numerous pieces, from the AI-assisted solo violin work composed by David Lang for Hahn's Deepmusic.ai project, to Lera Auerbach's Sonata No. 4, Fractured Dreams, and Einojuhani Rautavaara's Two Serenades. Hahn released the latter in 2021 on the album Paris, alongside Ernest Chausson's Poème and Sergei Prokofiev's Violin Concerto No. 1. The recording of her latest commissioned work for solo violin, 6 Partitas by Antón García Abril, was released in 2019. Lang, Auerbach, Rautavaara, and García Abril were also among the composers featured in In 27 Pieces: the Hilary Hahn Encores, Hahn's Grammy-winning, multi-year commissioning project designed to enrich the genre of duo encore pieces.
Since the beginning of her career, Hahn has maintained informal contact with her fans. She signs autographs after almost every concert, and she curates and publishes a collection of fan art she has received over 20 years. As an early and avid blogger, Hahn offers numerous original posts on her website dating back to 2002. Her "Postcards from the Road" series, featuring personal accounts of her travels around the world, originated from a year-long postcard project with a class of eight- and nine-year-olds. Her "Baby Concerts," developed during residencies in Vienna, Seattle, Lyon, Philadelphia, and Chicago, offer parents the opportunity to experience live classical music with their toddlers, always free of charge and at baby-friendly times. Additionally, she frequently performs music in unconventional venues, such as dance workshops, yoga classes, or knitting groups.
Hahn's commitment to her fans also includes numerous educational activities. A former Suzuki program student, she released new recordings for the first three books of the Suzuki Violin School in 2020 in partnership with the International Suzuki Association and Alfred Music, which also appeared on the educational platform MakeMusic (formerly SmartMusic). In 2019, she released the sheet music for her encore project In 27 Pieces: the Hilary Hahn Encores, complete with fingerings, bowings, and performance notes for each commissioned work, and she published a series of short video masterclasses on the 6 Partitas. She donated the $25,000 from her Glashütte Original Festival Prize to Project 440, a non-profit music education program in Philadelphia that helps young people learn essential life skills. Her Instagram practice series #100daysofpractice helped bring the arduous act of practicing out of solitude and presented it as a community-oriented, social component of artistic development. Since starting the series in 2017, Hahn has personally completed the project four times under @violincase, with 900,000 posts from fellow musicians and students.
Hahn has made numerous acclaimed recordings; her 22 albums released on Decca, Deutsche Grammophon, and Sony each immediately entered the top ten of the Billboard charts. She has appeared on three DVDs, an award-winning children's recording, and various anthologies. Three of her albums have won Grammys: Concertos by Brahms and Stravinsky in 2003, Concertos by Schoenberg and Sibelius in 2008, and In 27 Pieces: the Hilary Hahn Encores in 2014. Jennifer Higdon's Violin Concerto, written for Hilary Hahn and recorded by her alongside the Tchaikovsky Concerto, received the Pulitzer Prize. In 2017, she released a retrospective tailored to her fans, which included new live material recorded direct-to-disc and featured fan art. Filmmaker Benedict Mirow has produced two documentaries: Hilary Hahn – A Portrait (2006) and Hilary Hahn – Evolution of an Artist, which traces the past 16 years of her career.
Hilary Hahn can also be heard in productions outside of classical music. She was among the stars of the Oscar-nominated soundtrack for The Village and contributed to two albums by the alt-rock band …And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead, Tom Brosseau's album Grand Forks, and a tour with folk-rock singer/songwriter Josh Ritter. In 2012, the album Silfra, recorded after intensive preparation with experimental composer and pianist Hauschka, was released.
Hilary Hahn has received numerous awards and honors. In 2001, Time magazine named her "America's Best Young Classical Musician," and in 2010, she appeared on Conan O'Brien's The Tonight Show. She holds honorary doctorates from Middlebury College, where she attended intensive German, French, and Japanese courses for four summers, and Ball State University, which has three scholarships in her name.
5/2023