NEW YORK — Star violinist Hilary Hahn is off the fast track for now: Returning from a six-month, injury-related hiatus, she is concertizing on a somewhat reduced schedule (so she wrote on Facebook) but with a kind of playing not always heard when great musicians are on the standard-repertoire treadmill. Now 45, she returned to the stage Feb. 26 at David Geffen Hall with a one-of-a-kind Brahms Violin Concerto performance with the New York Philharmonic — in full throttle, by the way — under Matthias Pintscher that showed how far she has evolved from when I first heard her in the mid-’90s. Is a different person inhabiting her psyche?
The younger Hahn always had rhetorical dignity but left questions of the music’s inner life mostly up to the audience. For all of that objectivity, her instincts took her to interesting places. In the Elgar Violin Concerto, for one, she tapped into the honeyed tone quality of Fritz Kreisler, for whom the piece was written. In recent years, Hahn has ventured into subjective territory in the Brahms concerto to the point where there was no doubt — from the charisma exuded by her operatic treatment of the first entrance — that every phrase had its own singular meaning, one that grew out of what came before but never distorted the concerto’s overall shape.
Overall, her performance of the Brahms had — in addition to her artistry — a glad-to-be-back charge that was spellbinding. Plus ease of expression. Whatever labor went into the physicality of her playing, one heard incredibly clean runs along with a hard-to-define quality indicating that she was getting absolutely everything she wanted out of her instrument. And she wanted a lot, particularly in Brahms’ first movement.
Though her imposing wall-of-sunshine tone quality could be easily pulled back into tender pianissimos, moments that normally convey anguished passion went a step further into rage, suggested by the magnitude of the sound and lack of coloristic varnish. Was this perception particularly apparent to listeners such as myself who feel betrayed by our destabilized world? No. It was right there in the performance, not imposed upon the music but drawn from its depths. Hahn’s 2001 recording of Brahms’ first movement is a mere sketch of what was revealed in the Lincoln Center performance.
Hahn has always connected strongly with the following two movements, the second having an even more concentrated lyricism and the Hungarian-flavored final movement being reckless in its feverishness, all the more genuine for not being flawless. I made a mental appointment to hear her at all future opportunities. The pinched nerve that kept her sidelined is apparently pinched no more.
Intermission chatter suggested that some Philharmonic goers didn’t quite get that the concert’s conductor was not the originally scheduled 97-year-old Herbert Blomstedt but the 54-year-old Pintscher, who lives part-time in New York, only a car-ride away from Geffen Hall. Such audience comments are a positive sign that the Philharmonic is reaching beyond the hardcore classical-music crowd. Blomstedt’s problem was an ear infection that left him unable to hear well enough to rehearse. Thus, his previously scheduled Schubert Symphony No. 6 (perhaps the composer’s least-played symphony, with Schubert masquerading as Rossini) was replaced by Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7. (Blomstedt’s backstage quip: “You’re replacing a deaf conductor with a deaf composer”).
Unfortunately, the Beethoven performance wasn’t what I had hoped for from Pintscher, the excellent modernist composer turned conductor. No special composer-to-composer insights were apparent, just a good, brisk run-through of no special distinction. Whether or not the violin concerto hogged the rehearsal time, Brahms clearly stole the most consideration.
