MARKING A MILESTONE

When Hilary Hahn decided to record Ysaÿe’s Six Solo Violin Sonatas for their centenary year, all the stars seemed to align in terms of both timing and fresh musical insights, as she tells Charlotte Gardner

J oseph Szigeti, Jacques Thibaud, George Enescu, Fritz Kreisler, Mathieu Crickboom and Manuel Quiroga: six violinists who as individuals spanned the gamut of musical language – from Enescu’s Romanian folk leanings and Quiroga’s Galician inflections, to Thibaud’s French sensuousness and sparkle – and who stand collectively as the dedicatees of Ysaÿe’s Bach-inspired Six Solo Violin Sonatas op.27. In this set, dating roughly from July 1923, each sonata is lovingly fashioned to its dedicatee’s personal vernacular, with their many in-jokes including (in no.2) Thibaud’s ‘obsession’ with Bach’s Solo Partita in E major. Essentially, there’s enough ‘golden age’ violinist DNA buried in this score’s pages to keep a musicolinguistic treasure hunter going for hours.

Not that Hilary Hahn – a direct descendant of Ysaÿe in violinistic terms, having been taught by his pupil Jascha Brodsky – had limitless hours when preparing her recording of it. In fact, it was pure serendipity that she was able to ‘squeak it in’, as she puts it, for the set’s centenary year at all. The idea came to her in October 2022, when, while touring to Ysaÿe’s former home capital of Brussels, she gratefully mused on her lineage, and then on the sonatas, which were already on her bucket list of recording projects. Musings turned into an online search for their composition date – ‘We tend to think of them as relatively contemporary, but it suddenly occurred to me that they may be a little bit older’ – and the discovery of their approaching milestone. Then came the rub, because a back-calculation revealed that any recording to coincide with the date would need to be in the can by Christmas. However, then came more serendipity, because not only did her touring schedule turn out to leave precisely the right number of pre- Christmas days to get the recording done, but also both her local Boston WGBH Studios and her usual coproducer, Antonio Oliart, were available.

PHOTOS CHRIS LEE

‘WHEN I LISTENED TO RECORDINGS OF YSAŸE, I REALISED THAT I’M MUCH CLOSER TO HIS WAY OF PLAYING THAN I EVER WAS BEFORE’

The next question was artistic feasibility. It had been over a decade since Hahn had last touched the pieces, but reading through the set she found that, whereas previously the sonatas had felt quite abstract to her, they were now coming naturally. This was partially down to experiences over the intervening years, such as having Spanish composer Antón García Abril write his Six Partitas for solo violin for her in 2014.

‘He coached me closely on them,’ she explains, ‘and I don’t think he realised, but he was also teaching me his roots.’ Consequently, the play-through of Sonata no.6 (‘à Manuel Quiroga’) now saw her recognising Spanish musical references she hadn’t understood before – and knowing what to do with them. So Hahn committed to the recording.

Much of the most valuable preparation happened in the studio, where she and Oliart began each session by listening to recordings of Ysaÿe and of the sonata of the day’s dedicatee – or, if the violinist wasn’t recorded, reading about them instead. ‘We would just geek out a little,’ says Hahn, ‘talk about our impressions. Because with these sonatas, you can play them all in the same way, but they’re actually written by a violinist for violinists he knew well. Ysaÿe really had the ability to customise them, and they do all feel different from each other. So even though when you’re studying a piece and you might try to play it a certain way, it could sound artificial; here, part of the spirit of the piece is to understand the player to whom it was dedicated. When I was able to do that, certain things jumped out a bit more.’

Most special of all, though, was what these listening sessions showed Hahn about herself. ‘It’s very difficult when you graduate to find your own identity, however prepared you think you are,’ she reflects. ‘Over the last decade, I feel I’ve got closer to bridging the gap between what I’ve been putting into my playing and what people have been taking out of it, and in that, I thought I was making my own path. But when I listened to recordings of Ysaÿe – which I didn’t do until I was in the studio, because I don’t spend much time on YouTube, where they are – I realised that I’m much closer to his way of playing than I ever was before. So in trying to find my voice, I’ve actually got closer to my roots.’

Pressed for an example, the first thing Hahn points to is rubato. ‘To bring out the melody, I will sometimes start the run just a little bit later, play it faster, then fit the embellishment in – and I want to arrive on time at the top. When I listened to Ysaÿe play, I realised that’s exactly how he did it too!’ Another example is tone production: ‘I’ve been developing different ways of fitting vibrato into my sound. It’s hard to describe, and more a feeling, but I hear the range of the pitch within my instrument, then I try not to break the resonance with the vibrato; and he does a similar thing, fitting the vibrato into the resonance of his tone.’ Hahn emphasises the word ‘similar’, because the sound is not identical – he’s still audibly a different player in a different era. Her analogy is of seeing a picture of an ancestor when they were her age. The excitement for the listener, meanwhile, is that the resulting readings sound both thoroughly Hahn and dramatically unlike any other solo Ysaÿe you’re likely to have heard. I tell Hahn that in fact the sensation of the music’s new-mintedness is so strong as to be almost a shock, albeit a good one. ‘When a piece is old enough to have a life of its own, it’s maybe time to cut an alternative path through the woods,’ she responds, ‘because the one path that is well trodden perhaps developed automatically, and actually there’s another way that would serve equally well. I knew Ysaÿe was doing a lot with these sonatas. So it was a case of trying to unravel the riddles in them, then creating an interpretation with what was left, by means of clues and traditions, and often I found that the answer was in the score itself.’

As for what is in the score and how to read it, Hahn has been guided by her work with living composers, by Ysaÿe’s own personality (anecdotally) and by how she has heard him play pieces she herself has played. ‘My conclusion is that the score has cues,’ she says. ‘It’s not super literal, and I can imagine that the composer would have wanted the performer to feel comfortable and make it their own. So that’s the angle that I took.’

Of course, she could also bounce ideas off Oliart, who she says always has really good suggestions for alternative approaches, if ever something isn’t coming across the way she thinks she’s feeling it. As for the recording takes, after years co-producing and co-editing, for her it’s about going for as long as possible, and using as much of it as possible so as not to change the feeling of an interpretation, or break the flow of the large arc.

Still, it was resonance, rather than the modus operandi, that was most filling Hahn’s head during recording sessions – and quite literally: in one especially evocative sentence in her sleeve note essay, she describes how she would emerge into the winter air afterwards in a haze, hypnotised, her brain ‘re-harmonised by the tonalities that had vibrated through my jawbone’. She evokes that line as we wrap up our conversation, elaborating that the jawbone sensation came about because these pieces are written so that if you play into them in a certain way they fit the resonance of the instrument. It’s the very quality she mentioned earlier about Ysaÿe’s – and now her own – playing in general. In other words, the extra DNA buried in these pieces is Ysaÿe’s own. She concludes, ‘I was trying to summon that sort of cyclical energy, while having as much freedom as possible, while having the dramatic dimension, and the references specific to each player and style.’ Hence how a recording that took just nine weeks from first idea to final note can sound so excitingly new, and glowingly natural.