Hahn, Salonen, Schoenberg, Sibelius: A Brief Note

Thanks to a heads-up by Washington Post classical music critic Anne Midgette (see this Sounds & Fury post) and a serendipitous subsequent airing on WQXR, we've now heard the new Deutsche Grammophon recording of violinist Hilary Hahn's reading of the Schoenberg and Sibelius violin concertos with Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra, and it's an impressive outing through and through. While Ms. Hahn's reading of the Sibelius is somewhat too cool and distant for our tastes and our understanding of the work, her reading is in every respect a perfectly valid one and performed here with flawless violinistic virtuosity.

But it's the Schoenberg that most captured our interest as it's a work we've now heard for the very first time. Ms. Midgette says that in this reading Ms. Hahn (and Mr. Salonen as well) are "smart enough not to get tied in knots by [the 'density' of] Schoenberg's score, and to see through it to the composer's inner romantic." After our one-time audition of this work and this performance, we respectfully disagree with that assessment — or, rather, with its wording. There's nothing in Schoenberg's score to "see through," and nothing "inner[ly] romantic" about this work. Its romanticism is up-front-and-center and in full bloom throughout the work's lushly orchestrated three movements; not the lyric romanticism of a Brahms or Tchaikovsky of course, but a full-blown romanticism nevertheless, 20th-century style, everywhere replete with unresolved dissonance and ferocious atonal 20th-century angst. Against big and sometimes sweeping romantic gestures in the orchestra the solo violin plays a largely "spiky" and "angular" counterpoint (to use praisefully two terms used pejoratively by Ms. Midgette) to electric effect, the gestalt deeply, arrestingly, and unabashedly heart-on-sleeve impassionedly expressive. And Ms. Hahn handles the impossibly difficult solo part with perfect assurance and a seeming effortlessness, her playing, again, flawless throughout, her tone rich and round whether playing angst-ridden fortissimos or tensely whispered harmonics.

We love this concerto at first hearing, and Ms. Hahn's performance here seems to us exemplary as does the performance of the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra under Mr. Salonen. This CD will soon occupy a place in our highly selective, still rebuilding CD library where you may be sure it will be accessed numerous times in future so that we may become more intimately familiar with this remarkable work and with this apparently equally remarkable performance.