Hilary Hahn

Hilary Hahn (born November 27, 1979) is an American violinist. She has performed throughout the world both as a soloist with leading orchestras and conductors and as a recitalist. She has also built a reputation as a champion of contemporary music. Several composers have written works for her, including concerti by Edgar Meyer and Jennifer Higdon, partitas by Antón García Abril, and a violin and piano sonata by Lera Auerbach.
Early life and education.
Hahn was born in Lexington, Virginia on November 27, 1979. She grew up in Baltimore, Maryland. Her father, Steve Hahn, was a journalist and librarian; her paternal great-grandmother was from Bad Dürkheim in Germany. Her mother Anne was an accountant.
Hahn was a child prodigy, and began playing the violin one month before her fourth birthday in the Suzuki Program of Baltimore's Peabody Institute. She participated in a Suzuki class for a year. From 1985 to 1990 she studied in Baltimore under Klara Berkovich. 
In 1990, at ten, Hahn was admitted to the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, where she became a student of Jascha Brodsky. She studied with Brodsky for seven years and learned the études of Kreutzer, Ševčík, Gaviniès, and Rode, and the Paganini Caprices. She also learned 28 violin concertos, as well as chamber works and assorted showpieces.
At 16, she had completed the Curtis Institute's university requirements, but she remained for several years to pursue elective courses until her graduation in May 1999 with a Bachelor of Music degree. During this time she studied violin with Jaime Laredo, and studied chamber music with Felix Galimir and Gary Graffman.
She also spent four summers in the total-immersion language programs in German, French, and Japanese at Middlebury College.
Musical career.
In 1991, at age 11, Hahn made her major orchestral debut with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. Soon thereafter she debuted with the Philadelphia Orchestra, Cleveland Orchestra, Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, and the New York Philharmonic. She made her international debut in 1994 performing the Bernstein "Serenade" in Hungary with Ivan Fischer and the Budapest Festival Orchestra. Her German debut came in 1995 with a performance of the Beethoven Violin Concerto with Lorin Maazel and the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra. The concert was broadcast in Europe. 
A year later, in 1996 at age 16, she debuted at Carnegie Hall in New York City as a soloist with the Philadelphia Orchestra, playing Saint-Saens’s third violin concerto. In a 1999 interview with "Strings Magazine", she cited people influential to her development as a musician and a student, including David Zinman, the conductor of the Baltimore Symphony and Hahn's mentor since she was ten, and Lorin Maazel, with whose Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra she performed in Europe.
Hahn began recording in 1996. Her earlier television appearances include "Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood" in 2000 (episode 1755), where Mr. Rogers visits a local music store and she plays for him. She has released 16 albums on the Deutsche Grammophon and Sony labels, three DVDs, an Oscar-nominated movie soundtrack, an award-winning recording for children, and various compilations. Her recordings often blend newer and traditional pieces. Her albums include pairings of Beethoven with Bernstein, Schoenberg with Sibelius, Brahms with Stravinsky, and Tchaikovsky with Jennifer Higdon.
She has played with orchestras such as the London Symphony Orchestra, New York Philharmonic, Boston Symphony Orchestra, Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, NHK Symphony Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic and Singapore Symphony Orchestra. In 2007 she debuted with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and played in Vatican City as part of the celebrations for Pope Benedict XVI with the Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra and conductor Gustavo Dudamel. The concert was recorded and released by Deutsche Grammophon.
She has also performed as a chamber musician. Since 1992 she has performed nearly every year with the Skaneateles Chamber Music Festival in Skaneateles, New York. From 1995 to 2000 she performed and studied chamber music at the Marlboro Music Festival in Vermont, and in 1996 she was an artist and a member of the chamber music mentoring program of The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. In 2004 she toured Saint Petersburg, Russia, with the Poulenc Trio.
Hahn has been interested in cross-genre collaboration and pushing musical boundaries. She began performing and touring in crossover duos with singer-songwriter Josh Ritter in 2007 and with singer-songwriter Tom Brosseau in 2005. She has recorded songs with "…And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead". In 2012 Hahn released an album with German pianist and composer Hauschka titled "Silfra". The songs on the disc were completely improvised. "Silfra" was produced by Valgeir Sigurðsson. According to her, "Other musicians cross genres all the time. For me it's not crossover—I just enter their world. It frees you up to think in a different way from what you've been trained to do."
In June 2014, she was awarded the "" of the Dresden Music Festival.
Since 2016 Hahn has piloted free concerts for parents with infants, a knitting circle, a community dance workshop, a yoga class, and art students. She plans to continue these community-oriented concerts, encouraging people to combine live performances with their interests outside the concert hall and providing opportunities for parents to hear music with their infants, who might be barred from traditional concerts.
In 2020, Hahn and AI roboticist and tech entrepreneur Carol E. Reiley cofounded DeepMusic.ai to work with artists and AI companies to amplify human creativity.
Commissioning.
Hahn is a noted champion of new works. In 1999 she commissioned Edgar Meyer to write a concerto. She later recorded the piece with the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra. In 2010 a concerto written for Hahn by Jennifer Higdon and recorded with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Music.
She commissioned 26 contemporary composers to write short encore pieces for "In 27 Pieces: the Hilary Hahn Encores". Among the composers are David Del Tredici, Jennifer Higdon, Du Yun, Elliott Sharp, David Lang, Nico Muhly, James Newton Howard, Valentyn Sylvestrov and Max Richter. For the 27th encore she held an open contest that drew more than 400 entries and was won by Jeff Myers. The international premiere tours, from 2011 to 2013, met with wide critical and audience acclaim. In November 2013 these 27 short pieces were released on Deutsche Grammophon. The recording won the Grammy Award for Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance.
In 2016 and 2017, in recital tours across the U.S., Europe, and Japan, she premiered six new partitas for solo violin by Antón García Abril, her first commissioning project for solo violin, as well as her first commission of a set of works from a single composer. She forged a relationship with García Abril during "In 27 Pieces: the Hilary Hahn Encores". Digital and physical editions of the complete sheet music will be released by the Musicnotes and Boosey & Hawkes. In 2019 Hahn and Lera Auerbach premiered Auerbach's sonata for violin and piano "Fractured Dreams".
Film music.
Hahn began her film recording career as the soloist for James Newton Howard's score for M. Night Shyamalan's "The Village" in 2004. The film was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Score. Her recording of Samuel Barber's Violin Concerto was used extensively in "The Deep Blue Sea", starring Rachel Weisz and Tom Hiddleston. The film uses the piece's second movement to accompany a nine-minute sequence. In 2013 she was the soloist on Andrew Hewitt's score for the film "The Sea".
On playing Bach.
In 1999 Hahn said that she played Bach more than any other composer and had played solo Bach pieces every day since she was eight.
In a segment on NPR titled "Musicians in Their Own Words", she spoke about the surreal experience of playing the Bach "Chaconne" (from the Partita for Violin No. 2) alone on the concert stage. In the same segment she discussed her experiences emulating a lark while playing "The Lark Ascending" by Ralph Vaughan Williams.
Instrument.
Her violin is an 1864 copy of Paganini's "Cannone" made by Jean-Baptiste Vuillaume. In an interview on Danish television Hahn said she almost never leaves her instrument out of sight. She uses bows by American bow maker Isaac Salchow and French bow makers Émile Ouchard, Paul Jombar, and Emil Miquel. For her strings, she uses Thomastik-Infeld Dominants for the A (aluminum wound), D and G (silver wound) and a Pirastro Gold Label Steel E.
Hahn has also acquired a second Vuillaume, an 1865 model loosely based on the 1715 Alard Stradivarius, and has used both in recent years for recording and performing.
Journal.
Hahn's website includes a section titled "By Hilary." In a "Strings Magazine" interview, she said that the idea for her "Postcards from the Road" feature originated during an outreach visit to a third-grade class in upstate New York. The class was doing a geography project in which the students asked everyone they knew who was traveling to send postcards from the cities they were visiting to learn more about the world. She decided to participate after receiving a positive reaction to her suggestion that she take part. She enjoyed her first year's experience with the project so much that she decided to continue it on her new website. A few years later she expanded the postcards to a journal format. Journal entries usually include photographs from her tours and rehearsals.
Personal life.
Hahn and her husband have lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts since 2016, after having lived in New York City for several years. They have two daughters. 
On September 1, 2019, Hahn announced that she was taking a year-long sabbatical and would resume performing in the 2020–21 season.