Dazzling return for Hahn on Bach cycle
It was just over 20 years ago that a teenage prodigy named Hilary Hahn announced her arrival with a brilliant recording of Bach’s music for unaccompanied violin. It’s not the kind of music that traditionally is used to launch a career, but Hahn’s approach — cleareyed, self-assured and technically impeccable — left little doubt that we were in the presence of an important artistic voice. That promise has been amply borne out in the intervening decades.
All that was missing was half of the repertoire. Bach wrote a total of six pieces for solo violin — three sonatas and three partitas — and Hahn recorded only three of them.
In her majestic recital on Sunday, Nov. 4, presented in Davies Symphony Hall by the San Francisco Symphony, Hahn finally let the other shoe drop — doing it, characteristically, in her own good time. Her appearance followed a recent recording that completes the Bach catalog, and it reaffirmed the power and beauty of her playing.
What’s the relationship between the young and the grown-up Hahn? A lot remains the same.
She still plays, as she always has, with a degree of clarity and precision that are almost uncanny. Her intonation is not only flawless but unruffled, as though playing every note perfectly in tune were no more difficult than tying one’s shoes. She creates rhythmic landscapes in which notes are reeled off in unbudgeably equal proportion — except when a nudge here or there is required for expressive purposes.
Most notably, Hahn’s playing boasts a cool alabaster surface, in which not so much
as a dent or wrinkle ever threatens the tonal beauty of her sound. And in executing Bach’s intricate counterpoint — particularly the fugue of the Sonata No. 1 in G Minor — she makes sure to let the listener hear and follow all the internal watchworks that make the music go.
What has been added to the mix in the intervening decades is a determination to put those resources to even more pointed expressive use. The opening movements of the Sonata No. 1 and the Partita No. 1 in B Minor called up a broader dynamic range than I remember her deploying in this music before. The Allemande that begins the Partita No. 2 in D Minor sounded almost improvisatory, at least by Hahn’s standards; she pulled back a tad on critical notes, creating a fetching illusion that she was feeling her way forward.
All these developments, though, were more or less at the margins; the essential character of Hahn’s playing remains stunningly intact. Some listeners may, understandably, find its unerring perfection a little off-putting, even chilly at times. To this taste, Hahn remains, as always, an artist of riveting and stately elegance.
There could, in any event, be little room for disagreement over her delivery of the capacious Chaconne at the end of the D-Minor Partita, which, aside from a gorgeous encore from Bach’s Sonata No. 2, concluded Sunday’s recital. The broad opening chords were both weighty and lithe, the ensuing variations full of character and the dramatic logic of the entire movement astonishingly cogent. If Bach’s music is a window into the artistic personality of a performer, Hahn continues to present one of the dazzlingly virtuosic voices of our time.