Hilary Hahn
About this Artist
Three-time Grammy Award-winning violinist Hilary Hahn melds expressive musicality and technical expertise with a diverse repertoire guided by artistic curiosity. Her barrier-breaking attitude towards classical music and her commitment to sharing her experiences with a global community have made her a fan favorite. Hahn is a prolific recording artist and commissioner of new works, and her 22 feature recordings have received every critical prize in the international press. Her Instagram-based practice initiative, #100daysofpractice, has helped to transform practicing into a community-oriented celebration of artistic development. Since creating the hashtag in 2017, Hahn has led the project four times under her handle, @violincase; fellow performers and students have contributed nearly 800,000 posts under the hashtag. She is currently Artist-in-Residence at both the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and London’s Wigmore Hall, and she is Co-Founder and VP of Artistic Partnerships of the AI-music initiative Deepmusic.AI.
This season, Hahn appears as soloist on concertos by Brahms, Sibelius, Dvořák, Tchaikovsky, and Prokofiev, as well as Pablo de Sarasate’s Carmen Fantasy and Rautavaara’s Deux Sérénades, which is heard in its U.S. premiere. Hahn also performs several solo recitals this season. In addition to recitals of works by Lera Auerbach and Prokofiev in London and Berlin, she performs the Bach repertoire that made her a household name in solo recitals in London, New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Chicago.
A strong advocate for new music, Hahn has championed and commissioned works by a diverse array of contemporary composers. Her 2021 release Paris features the world-premiere recording of Einojuhani Rautavaara’s Deux Sérénades, a piece written for Hahn and completed posthumously by Kalevi Aho; Hahn premiered it in 2019. Other recent commissions include Michael Abels’ Isolation Variation—Hahn’s recording of which was nominated for a Grammy Award in the Best Classical Instrumental Solo category—Barbara Assiginaak’s Sphinx Moth, Lera Auerbach’s Sonata No. 4: Fractured Dreams, and Six Partitas by Antón García Abril, a recording of which was released in 2019. García Abril, Auerbach, and Rautavaara were contributing composers for In 27 Pieces: the Hilary Hahn Encores, Hahn’s Grammy Award-winning multi-year commissioning project to revitalize the duo encore genre.
Hahn’s 22 feature albums on Decca, Deutsche Grammophon, and Sony have all opened in the Top 10 of the Billboard charts. Her most recent recording, 2022’s Eclipse, celebrates Hahn’s return to the stage and studio after two seasons away and features pieces by Dvořák, Ginastera, and Sarasate. Three of Hahn’s albums—her 2003 Brahms and Stravinsky concerto disc, a 2008 pairing of the Schoenberg and Sibelius concertos, and her 2013 recording of In 27 Pieces: the Hilary Hahn Encores—have been awarded Grammys.
Hahn has related to her fans naturally from the very beginning of her career. She has held signings after nearly every concert and maintains and shares a collection of the fan art she has received over the course of 20 years. Her “Bring Your Own Baby” concerts create opportunities for parents of infants to share their enjoyment of live classical music with their children in a nurturing, welcoming environment. Hahn’s commitment to her fans extends to a long history of educational initiatives. A former Suzuki student, she released new recordings of the first three books of the Suzuki Violin School in 2020, in partnership with the International Suzuki Association and Alfred Music.
Hahn is the recipient of numerous awards and recognitions. She received the 11th Annual Glasshütte Original Music Festival Award, which she donated to the Philadelphia-based music education nonprofit Project 440. She received the Herbert von Karajan award in 2021 and delivered the keynote speech to the Second Annual Women in Classical Music Symposium in the same year. In 2023, she was named Musical America’s Artist of the Year. Hahn was the 2022 Chubb Fellow at Yale University’s Timothy Dwight College; she also holds honorary doctorates from Middlebury College—where she spent four summers in the total immersion German-, French-, and Japanese-language programs—and Ball State University, where there are three scholarships in her name.