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On 'Eclipse,' Hilary Hahn turns to Dvorak, Ginastera and Sarasate after yearlong sabbatical / VAN

Hilary Hahn’s latest album, Eclipse, celebrates the power of authenticity. Recorded with the Frankfurt Radio Symphony and its Music Director (2014-2021), Andrés Orozco-Estrada, it sees the triple Grammy-winning violinist deliver interpretations of three works charged with universal emotions yet rooted in their composers’ musical heritage: Dvorák’s Violin Concerto, a tour de force from the Czech composer’s “Slavic period,” Ginastera’s Violin Concerto, a strikingly original 20th-century gem, and Sarasate’s Carmen Fantasy, among the greatest virtuoso showpieces of all time. “This recording tells stories I didn’t understand until I returned to the stage after a long hiatus: the elation of coming into one’s own, the declaration of an artistic identity, and what it means to regain your native language through music,” says Hahn. Eclipse is set for release by Deutsche Grammophon on 7 October 2022 on CD, 2 LPs, and digitally, including a Dolby Atmos version.

The album marks a series of musical milestones for the violinist. She has long loved the works it contains and discovered fresh insights and details of expression as she recorded each of them for the first time. Eclipse also reflects Hahn’s close collaboration with the musicians of the Frankfurt Radio Symphony (in their home city and on tour) and her extensive partnership with Maestro Orozco-Estrada. Above all, it documents her return to recording, following a year-long sabbatical and many additional months of artistic solitude.

Hahn experienced intense personal evolution during her time away from the stage. After waves of canceled concerts and extended solo preparation, she arrived in Frankfurt for the live-stream of Dvorák’s Violin Concerto, unsure of where her playing would lead her. With Orozco-Estrada and the Frankfurt musicians, Hahn returned to her truest form of expression, performing. In isolation, she realized, her musical identity had strengthened rather than waned. “When I got onstage for the Dvorák in April last year,” she recalls, “it was like a jolt of life, as if the world came rushing back in Technicolor.” Hahn and the Frankfurt Radio Symphony gave their first post-lockdown concert together in front of an audience two months later, during which their Ginastera and Sarasate performances were recorded live.


VAN'S Olivia Giovetti writes….Hilary Hahn had announced in September of 2019 that she would take a yearlong sabbatical from performing, returning to the concert stage in the 2020-21 season. At the time she wrote, somewhat prophetically, that “the best way for me to find out what this sabbatical is meant to be is to start it and see where it wants to take me.” 

Hahn turned to Dvorák, who was 37 when he wrote his Violin Concerto. It’s a work that wrestles with vision over tradition, to the point where its original muse and dedicatee, Joseph Joachim, objected to Dvorák’s break with the classical form. The first movement flows without pause into the second, a dinner table discussion that moves uninterrupted into the living room for coffee and continues, unnoticed, long past midnight. At times, violin lines sound like improvised cadenzas rather than codified phrases, trailing off mid-sentence before quickly alighting on something else. A Czech composer who struggled between nationalism and cosmopolitanism, Dvorák seems to be figuring himself out in this work.

So, too, does Hahn who, at 42, is acutely aware of her career and its phases. “We’re in the middle of our careers,” she said of herself and conductor for this album, Andrés Orozco-Estrada. “We’ve had time to define who we are as musicians, but we’re still on a big path. It’s the middle landing point, but it’s a really important landing point because it’s where you start to reassess and define for yourself where you’ve come from and where you’ve arrived.” Giving space to uncertainty and ambiguity leads to a compelling navigation through Dvorák’s dialectical concerto. It’s also key for Ginastera, a composer who—much like Dvorák—found his artistic identity entwined with both his spirituality and national identity (though he eventually moved away from, rather than towards, the latter impulse).

Ginastera’s Violin Concerto breaks down in order to rebuild, with its first movement broken up into six rigorous studies. Listen to Hahn play nothing but thirds for one nonstop minute, and you start to question reality. That, too, is kind of the point. As much as all things can be—as Jenny Holzer put it—delicately interconnected, that connection can just as easily be fractured versus fluid. It makes the landing points that much more crucial. 


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