Hilary Hahn still amazing the critics

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Hilary Hahn received a couple of reviews from a couple of different concerts last week. What is amazing about this current spate of reviews is the concerts are only days apart showing her ability to not only provide a stunning performance, but to do so consistently. She has a grueling schedule over the next month, coming off a manic schedule in February and still she amazes the critics.

David Patrick Stearns of Philly.com wrote an extended glowing review of her concert in Philadelphia last Thursday:

"The concert could be called Hahn's song-and-dance program. The unlikely and rather weighty combination of Ives (three violin sonatas), Brahms (seven Hungarian Dances), Ysaye (two unaccompanied violin sonatas), and Bartok (six Romanian Folk Dances) showed composers of hugely different temperament but whose lifetimes overlapped one another, all attempting to access the kind of melodic energy they heard in the vernacular music going on around them.

Hilary Hahn & Valentina Lisitisa
"Was Hahn being intentionally provocative by pairing Brahms and Ives? In his writings, Ives was a particularly cranky Yankee on the subject of his Viennese elder - and indeed dominated Hahn's program. She played Violin Sonatas Nos. 1, 2, and 4, though hardly in the typical fashion that attempts to show the early-20th-century composer as decades ahead of his time - or as some eccentric folk-art counterpart to Grandma Moses. With pianist Valentina Lisitsa, the sonatas came off as American impressionism, though without the kind of tonal stability of, say, Debussy."

John von Rhein of the Chicago Tribune gave a similarly glowing tribute of her concert in Chicago on Sunday, comparing Hahn with Pinchas Zukerman who also performed in Chicago this weekend:

Two Eugene Ysaye solo sonatas proved that Hahn commands a technique second to none among today's young superstars of the violin.

Highlighting (Zukerman's) program was Dmitri Shostakovich's Viola Sonata, the final work completed by the Russian master before his death in 1975. Zukerman's reading burned with bleak intensity.

Upcoming concert dates:

Mar. 11Toronto, ON
Roy Thomson Hall		 Toronto Symphony Orchestra
Peter Oundjian, conductor
Higdon: Violin Concerto (Canada Premiere)
Mar. 22Baden Baden, Germany
Festspielhaus		 Valentina Lisitsa, piano Recital
Mar. 23Berlin, Germany
Philharmonie		 Valentina Lisitsa, piano Recital
Mar. 25Ljubljana, Slovenia
Cankarjev Dom		 Valentina Lisitsa, piano Recital
Mar. 26Vienna, Austria
Konzerthaus		 Valentina Lisitsa, piano Recital
Mar. 27Zagreb, Croatia
Dvorana Lisinski Halle		 Valentina Lisitsa, piano Recital
Mar. 29Perugia, Italy
Sala dei Notari		 Valentina Lisitsa, piano Recital
Mar. 30Milan, Italy
Conservatorio Verdi		 Valentina Lisitsa, piano Recital
Apr. 1London, UK
Barbican Hall		 Valentina Lisitsa, piano Recital

Wouldn't you know it... I'm moving from the UK at the end of this month just in time to MISS her appearance in London.

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