Review: Hilary Hahn’s ’27 Pieces’ strikingly heterogeneous during Disney Hall
6 views - published on May 9th, 2013 in Disney News tagged Disney, disney news, disneyland, walt disney, walt disney worldThey are, moreover, partial of what is certainly a conspicuous new golden age of violinists in their 30s — Leila Josefowicz and Janine Jansen are also in a picture. All have been elaborating from glamorous prodigies into hazardous mature artists who are relocating a violin into new realms.
But nothing has shown some-more startling new growth than Hahn did in her distinguished Disney Hall show with elements from her commissioning project: “In 27 Pieces: The Hilary Hahn Encores.”
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The encores aren’t encores, during slightest Hahn did not provide them as such on Tuesday’s program. Instead, she featured 8 brief pieces interspersed between sonatas by Fauré and Mozart, along with Bach’s solo Chaconne in D Minor.
The new works were a furious brew — edgy, violent, sweet, clearly sweet, ethereal, earthy, folksy, apparently descriptive, complexly abstract. The violinist writes in her module note that she listened widely late during night to song she had never heard, and when she found pieces she desired she “made nerve-wracking cold calls to a composers to ask them to attend in my project.”
The brew is so interestingly heterogeneous that a initial doubt has to be: Just who is Hilary Hahn? She done a dash as a shockingly well-put-together teen violinist, her Bach in sold being musically distant over her years. In her 20s she became famous as an resistant control freak. Many conductors found her tough to work with. Although coolly collected and definitely serious, she stretched her repertory with such counsel that she courted shallowness and became a new song lightweight.
That was not, however, a Hahn who walked onstage Tuesday, or not entirely. She wore an scarcely divulgence (for her) gown, and tore into Elliott Sharp’s well-named “Storm of a Eye.” Sharp is a longtime tie of New York’s downtown fashionable scene, a composer and multi-instrumentalist improviser remarkable for raw, aloud oppressive sound. Hahn braved this storm’s eye with all her technique total and in a routine done a nauseous pleasing and astounding.
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Also new for Hahn was her accompanist, Cory Smythe. A immature New York new song pianist, he demonstrated a stimulating clarity of tone, as good as an sparkling clarity of tone and rhythm. The piano partial indispensable to browbeat David Lang’s indolent “Light Moving,” a ease reverence to early Minimalism, as it indispensable to lead most of Mozart’s short, early Sonata in E-flat, K. 302, and Hahn — this, too, surprising for her — let it. The sonata perceived was a gloriously crisp, low-pitched and excitingly uninformed reading.
As for a rest of a normal repertory, a Chaconne, that Hahn dedicated to a memory of cellist Janos Starker, was a transfixing instance of her architectural approach with Bach and her complete authority of her instrument. Only Fauré’s early Sonata No. 1, Opus 13, was disappointing, here a calm Hahn refusing to let go an inch.
But a news was in a new. David Del Tredici’s “Farewell” suggested his special hold in a approach he creates a touching balance ramble where it substantially shouldn’t and afterwards be splendidly welcomed home. British composer Richard Barrett’s “Shade” was during a conflicting finish of a spectrum, an intricately fashioned practice in high-end low-pitched engineering.
Azerbaijani composer Franghiz Ali-Zadeh, done renouned in a West by a Kronos Quartet, gave Hahn, in “Impulse,” a fractured, autocratic arrangement square — a knockout. The Ukrainian Valentin Silvestrov dwelled, as he mostly likes to, on a mystically sour dregs of nostalgia in his vivid Two Pieces (Waltz and Christmas Serenade). There was no module note for L.A. composer James Newton Howard’s sensuous though concerned “133 … At Least,” so a pretension stays a mystery.
As partial of her commissioning project, Hahn sponsored a competition for a final encore. The leader was Hawaiian composer Jeff Myers, and a violinist pennyless into a singular grin while squealing enticingly in his outlandish “The Angry Birds of Kauai.” A unequivocally good hold was Hahn’s tangible encore. It was a universe premiere of one of a competition’s runners-up, Rani Sharone’s “Tick.” Tick it did, imaginatively.
In a most bigger clarity Hahn has unequivocally begun to tick, too, as a proponent for new music. Tuesday she valid that she has a intensity to make a difference.
mark.swed@latimes.com
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