Photo By Kasskara

Look into my eyes: Hilary Hahn is a busy woman.

In her 23-year career, violinist Hilary Hahn has amassed a press kit that rivals the thickness of a small city's phone directory. For a gifted and driven Classical talent, that's an impressive feat. What elevates it to a more startling level is the fact that Hahn herself is slightly less than four years older than her career.

The Virginia native moved to Baltimore at age 3 with her family where she started her career with five years of violin lessons in the Suzuki Program of the Peabody Conservatory. At 10, Hahn performed her first solo recital; the following year she debuted with the Baltimore Symphony, then transferred to Philadelphia's Curtis Institute of Music pursue her Bachelor's degree while taking high school courses. At 16, Hahn made her international debut, and at 17 she signed with Sony Classical, the youngest artist in the label's history to hold an exclusive contract.

Hahn scored a couple of Grammy wins and generated big sales numbers before moving to Deutsche Grammophon, which just released her moving new Paganini/Spohr violin concerto disc. Then there's her guest appearance on Rock band ...And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead's Worlds Apart album and her work on the soundtrack to M. Night Shyamalan's The Village. And that's just the Reader's Digest version.

With so much accomplishment and artistic credibility on her resume, it would be easy for Hahn to exorcise at least a little of her inner prima donna on occasion. In fact, she has little use for that kind of ego trip, particularly when it comes to the performance of music that she profoundly respects and loves.

"It is a fine line, one that defines each artist depending how they perceive their role in the interpretive process," says Hahn from her Philadelphia home. "For me, I use the music as my reference and stick to it as much as possible, but I have to feel comfortable with what I'm doing. So if it says to do something in the music and I've tried and tried and it just isn't working for me, I kind of have to make a decision at that point whether I'm going to keep trying or go in a direction that's more intuitive."

When it comes to recording, Hahn applies a similar ethic, whether she's working on a piece she's suggested or something recommended by her label.

"Partly it's the familiarity I have with the pieces and partly how each recording fits into the general scheme of what I've recorded already," Hahn says. "I like to program things on a recording so people find something they weren't aware of but they also aren't thrown into entirely foreign territory. For example, with the Paganini and Spohr, people might not know either piece very well, but I'm sure they know opera. And even if they've never heard an opera or a piece of Classical music before, they can recognize the vocal element.

"I always try to find something that people can refer to as a jumping off point and then go from there and present them with either a different way of playing it or something that partners with that piece that they might not be familiar with. That's the thing about Classical music there's so much variety and so many options, there's not really any reason to do what other people have done before."

This might be the cornerstone of Hahn's immense talent. She has enough respect for and understanding of the beauty and integrity of a piece of music to play it with technical authority and enough confidence in her abilities and intuition to play it with contemporary energy and a modern perspective. Hahn truly is the best of both worlds.

"A lot of what we think is longstanding Classical tradition actually developed relatively recently in Classical music's history," Hahn says. "The whole thing of taking Classical music so seriously is relatively recent. I mean, in the premiere of the Beethoven violin concerto, between the movements the violinist fiddled backwards behind his head or upside down to entertain the crowd, and that was perfectly acceptable. Audiences would not let people continue until they replayed certain movements, and there were riots during concerts. It was Rock music."

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HILARY HAHN appears with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra Friday and Saturday as the principal soloist on Britten's Violin Concerto No. 1.