Hilary Hahn

Known for her delicate touch and colorful style, American classical musician Hilary Hahn – born in Lexington, Virginia on November 27, 1979 - became established at a young age as one of the world's leading violinists with performances with many of the world's great orchestras, acclaimed recitals and award-winning recordings. As well as the standard concertos of classical composers such as J.S. Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Elgar, Paganini and Stravinsky, she has commissioned original works by contemporary composers including Edgar Meyer, Jennifer Higdon and Antón García Abril. In 2010, Time Magazine hailed her as America's Best Young Classical Musician. Hilary Hahn picked up her first violin at the age of three and attended the Peabody Institute in Baltimore while still very young. After further study at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, she debuted with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra in 1991 at the age of eleven. She went on to perform with symphony orchestras in Pittsburgh, Utah and Bavaria plus the New York Philharmonic as she continued her schooling. Her first recording, Hilary Hahn Plays Bach, was released in 1987 but her next did not come until 1999 when Beethoven: Violin Concerto/Bernstein: Serenade, which reached Number 17 on Billboard's Classical Albums Chart. Brahms/Stravinsky: Violin Concertos (2002) with Neville Marriner and the Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields went to Number 25 and won a Grammy Award. Bach: Violin Concertos (2003) with Jeffrey Kahane and the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra went to Number 6 on the Billboard Classical Albums Chart. Elgar/Vaughan Williams: Concerto for Violin/The Lark Ascending (2004), with the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Colin Davis peaked at Number 13. Schoenberg: Violin Concertos (2008) with the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen peaked at Number 7 and won Hahn her second Grammy Award. Hilary Hahn can be heard on several movie soundtracks: she played on James Newton Howard's Academy Award-nominated score for the 2005 feature film The Village and her recording of Samuel Barber's Violin Concerto is featured on the soundtrack of Terence Davies's 2011 film The Deep Blue Sea. She released two albums in 2018, Retrospective, a collection of tracks from her 12 previous albums, and Hilary Hahn Plays Bach: Sonatas 1 & 2/Partita 2. Hilary Hahn released her album Paris – recorded with the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France - in January 2021.