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Hilary Hahn donates $25,000 award to music education charity
HAHN PHOTO DANA VAN LEEUWEN/DECCA
Violinist Hilary Hahn has chosen the Philadelphia-based Project 440 as the beneficiary of her 2014 Dresden Music Festival’s Glashütte Original prize. The award recognises commitment to music education, and comes with a €25,000 cash element to be donated to an educational organisation of the recipient’s choice.
Project 440 does not teach music, but rather runs programmes that ‘draw on a shared love of music to help young people build essential life skills’, offering free after-school classes and an annual college fair for musicians.
In its citation, the festival award committee said, ‘Through her authentic, contemporary musical language, Hilary Hahn reaches beyond the concert hall to young classical music fans.’
The violinist’s innovative use of social media was singled out, as well as her teaching work with string students: ‘She inspires young musicians through her intense and uncompromising way of making music.’
Hahn moved to Philadelphia at the age of ten to attend the Curtis Institute of Music and made her concerto debut in the city a year later. She lived in the city until her mid-twenties.
‘Project 440 serves a crucial purpose within the arts world,’ Hahn said. ‘They reach across a broad socio-economic spectrum to high school students, helping them to take leadership roles in their communities and rehearsing life skills within the shared language of music.
‘Many organisations are doing great work around personal leadership, but the way Project 440 goes about it is different from anything I’ve seen. I believe that music can be a starting point for so many kinds of conversations. Musical study has parallels across multiple disciplines: daily practice, self-guided development, the translation of history into the present day, empathy, communication, and collaboration.
‘To harness that shared basis into a sense of purpose in the wider world not only helps music, it helps the world. Project 440 is poised to implement their projects on a larger scale, and I hope this grant will help them to reach their goals for the 2019–20 school year. They are a small organisation with a big impact. I’m excited to see what’s ahead!’
MOB MENTALITY: Christian Tetzlaff performed ‘Méditation’ from Massenet’s Thaïs in front of an orchestra of more than 1,300 and an audience of over 2,000 on 21 September. Organised by the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin (DSO), the ‘Symphonic Mob’ took place at the Mall of Berlin in the city’s Leipziger Platz. DSO chief conductor Robin Ticciati presided over the concert, in which the participants also played works by Dvořák and Verdi. Tetzlaff’s performance can be viewed at bit.ly/2mrqE9K. Photo: Peter Adamik