Dvořák, Ginastera, Sarasate – Hilary Hahn

Titles, these days, want to mean something. Hilary Hahn calls her new Deutsche Grammophon disc Eclipse, and the story behind it — a pandemic that emptied her calendar and, by her own account, her sense of purpose — is affecting. But an artist’s inner weather doesn’t always show up in the outer interpretation. I spent much of this record listening for the eclipse and instead heard three works that have nothing to do with one another beyond the fact that Hahn plays them all extremely well.

The Dvořák Violin Concerto in A minor, op. 53, is the disc’s main business. It has never quite gotten the respect of its cousins — the Brahms, the Tchaikovsky, even the Sibelius — despite melodic invention as generous as anything in the Cello Concerto. Dvořák wrote it for Joseph Joachim, who never played it, found the first movement’s lack of a proper recapitulation structurally unsound, and sent it back for revisions that didn’t fully satisfy him even then. It took another fiddler, František Ondříček, to give the premiere in Prague in 1883. The piece has spent the ensuing century and change being admired more than loved.

Hahn’s tone here is leaner than I remember from her earlier Bach and Mozart discs. There’s a steely core to it now, especially in the upper register, and the engineers have placed her forward enough that every bow-change registers as a small event. In the first movement this pays off in the more turbulent passagework, where she digs into the string with real bite, but I found myself wanting more air around the lyrical material. That long-breathed second theme deserves some bloom, some give, and instead it arrives a touch clipped. The slow movement fares better. Here the woodwinds of the Frankfurt Radio Symphony, warm and unhurried under Andrés Orozco-Estrada, provide exactly the cushioning Hahn’s tone needs, and there are moments — the exchange with the solo clarinet, in particular — that achieve real tenderness. The finale, a furiant dressed up in concert clothes, wants abandon more than precision, and Hahn gives us plenty of the latter. Whether that’s the right trade is a matter of taste. Josef Suk, on his old Supraphon release, understood this music from the inside in a way that’s hard to compete with; so, differently, did Itzhak Perlman with Ormandy, all Romantic sweep and unapologetic schmaltz. Hahn’s version is cooler, more scrupulous, occasionally thrilling, rarely ingratiating.

The Ginastera Violin Concerto, op. 30, is the disc’s real discovery, or ought to be. This is not a work you hear often, and Hahn deserves credit simply for programming it. Written in 1963 for Ruggiero Ricci, it’s a ferocious, spiky, unapologetically modernist piece, its first movement built from a cadenza that requires the soloist to state, apparently, every possible interval before the orchestra even enters. Hahn dispatches this with a kind of athletic relish that suits her better than the Dvořák’s Romantic ardor does. The second movement, a nocturnal study marked “quasi improvisando,” floats over string harmonics and shivering percussion with genuine atmosphere. The finale is a scramble of dance rhythms that Orozco-Estrada’s orchestra attacks with real teeth. This is playing of high wire virtuosity, and it’s exciting in a way the Dvořák, for all its polish, mostly isn’t.

Then comes the Sarasate — the “Carmen” Fantasy, op. 25 — which functions here as dessert, and a rather rich one. Hahn has recorded flashier salon pieces before and always with a certain reserve, a refusal to overplay the wink. That restraint serves the “Habanera” section beautifully, with its sly portamento, but I wanted more swagger in the “Danse bohème” that closes things out. More rosin dust in the air. More sense of a violinist enjoying her own outrageousness. Heifetz never worried about good taste in this piece. Hahn always does, and here that’s almost a fault.

Orozco-Estrada is a sympathetic partner throughout, and the Frankfurt orchestra sounds engaged rather than merely accompanying — no small thing in repertoire that so easily becomes wallpaper behind the soloist. The sound itself, recorded across two Frankfurt venues, is bright and immediate, sometimes to the violin’s slight disadvantage; a little more distance might have let Hahn’s phrasing breathe.

An uneven record, generously played, oddly assembled. The Ginastera alone is worth the purchase. The rest asks you to admire craft that occasionally forgets to seduce.