Hilary Hahn: Paris
Deutsche Grammophon

Hilary Hahn's latest album offers travel-starved listeners the vicarious pleasure of a Paris sojourn, with the violinist partnering with the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France and its Music Director Mikko Franck for the project. One of the more commendable aspects of the release is its inspired set-list: in place of predictable Paris-associated choices, Hahn and company present Poème by Parisian-born composer Ernest Chausson, Einojuhani Rautavaara's Deux Sérénades, and Sergei Prokofiev's Violin Concerto No.1, which received its first performance in the French capital in 1923. All three are treated to magnificent readings, but it's the inclusion of Deux Sérénades that makes Paris even more special, given that Rautavaara's final score was written for and premiered by Hahn with Franck and the OPRF in February 2019.

Hahn's love for the city runs deep. She's played there since she was a teenager, returns to it annually to give concerts and luxuriate in the city's cultural splendour, and has developed a long-standing relationship with Franck and the OPRF. The seed for Paris was planted when during her term as artist-in-residence with the orchestra during its 2018-19 season she and Franck determined they should capitalize on the rapport they'd collectively developed and make an album to capture that spirit.

The piece that established the template for the recording was Rautavaara's Deux Sérénades, which followed other works Hahn had recorded and performed by him. In 2010, he wrote Whispering for her In 27 Pieces: the Hilary Hahn Encores project, and four years later she performed his Violin Concerto with Franck and the OPRF. Subsequent to that, she asked the Finnish conductor whether the composer might consider writing a second concerto, which prompted him to broach the idea with Rautavaara. Unfortunately, ill health led to his death in July 2016 at eighty-seven, which seemed to suggest the work's creation would go unfulfilled, but in a stunning turn-of-events, his widow showed Franck after the funeral an almost complete manuscript of a work for violin and orchestra, clearly the piece intended for Hahn. To finish the orchestration, which had been finished through to the middle of the second serenade, Rautavaara's former student, Finnish composer Kalevi Aho, was engaged, leading to the premiere performance and two years later its release on the recording.

The lyricism for which the contemporary Finnish composer is known is evident in these rhapsodic serenades, but they're marked even more by tenderness and a sincere appreciation for love and life—the individual titles affirm as much, with the sumptuous “Sérénade pour mon amour” and “Sérénade pour la vie” both using themes from earlier Rautavaara vocal works as blueprints of sorts. Orchestra and soloist execute the material with conviction, her luminous voice soaring gracefully alongside the elegant expressiveness of the orchestra. Here and throughout the album, Hahn is unerring in her command of dynamics, vibrato, and pitch and connects with Rautavaara's material at the deepest level. “Sérénade pour la vie” is the slightly more expansive one of the two, its radiant gaze directed not upon a single subject of adoration but towards the wondrous gift of life itself, however fleeting and transient it might be. Of course the poignancy of the material is intensified by awareness of the fact that the work was the last one he composed.

In selecting the other pieces, Hahn chose two that, while dramatically different, are rooted in the musical history of the city. The first performance of Chausson's luscious Poème was given by Belgian violinist Eugène Ysaÿe (for whom it was written) in 1896, three years before the composer would die in a cycling accident. It's as expressionistic as it is impressionistic, and rich in melancholy gestures and grand statements. Alternately brooding and spirited, the score traverses a range of emotions, with the violin at the forefront for much of it. Hahn plays marvelously, her formidable turn perhaps elevated by the personal meaning involved, Ysaÿe having been her teacher's teacher.

If Prokofiev's Violin Concerto No.1 is the warhorse of the three, it sounds anything but tired. While it's one Hahn's known and played for decades, its appearance on Paris marks her first recording of the three-movement favourite. Premiered in Paris six years after its composition in Russia, the work challenges the soloist with mercurial twists-and-turns, but Hahn more than meets the challenge. Her lyrical side is called upon for the opening part, which evolves fluidly through passages of delicacy, devilry, and urgency. The second is shorter, but the scherzo nevertheless makes virtuosic demands on both soloist and orchestra in careening between impish and muscular episodes; if, like the other two, the third movement oscillates rapidly between contrasting moods and figures, its serene and ethereal moments distinguish it from others.

March 2021