Taking a page from rock bands, Hilary Hahn is hitting the road.
The internationally acclaimed violinist, and her longtime recital partner, pianist Natalie Zhu, have rented a bus for Hahn’s first coast-to-coast road tour.
The three-week, 14-city tour will take the twosome from Santa Barbara, Calif., to Philadelphia, with performances everywhere from Morrow, Ga., to Carnegie Hall in New York.
Their trek will also bring them to the Front Range for three stops, beginning Thursday evening with a concert in Boulder as part of the University of Colorado Artist Series.
“I’ve always played in small and big places,” Hahn said in a phone interview. “It’s kind of interesting in the small places because maybe there aren’t so many concerts there and people aren’t so jaded about concert experiences.
“There are always people in the big cities who aren’t jaded either, and there is always an enthusiastic audience somewhere, but in the small towns it’s more of an event.”
If using buses to crisscross America is old news in pop music, it’s almost unknown in the classical world, where most artists get from one place to another by plane.
But Hahn is tired of air-travel hassles – the increased security, risk of lost luggage and sheer fatigue involved. Even worse, her fingers don’t feel right for as much as a day after a flight because of the changing air pressure.
“If you notice when you fly that water bottles contract and expand and your feet swell up, that’s kind of what happens to my hands and my coordination,” she said.
“So it’s really much nicer to have a moving little house. You have luggage-storage space, a kitchenette, a DVD player and games and everything.
“You can just hang out. And, also, you can’t practice in an airport or on a plane but you can kind of practice on a bus.”
For the tour, Hahn plans to bring along her pet mouse and plaster the sides of the bus with banners advertising her newest album – a just-released collection of four violin sonatas by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
“It’s a real circus – like Barnum and Bailey,” she said.
If all that sounds like yet another artist wallowing in egotism, it isn’t.
Hahn ranks among the most popular young classical artists in the world, with her 2003 recording of concertos by Johann Sebastian Bach selling more than 115,000 copies. That’s a huge hit in the classical world where success is measured in much smaller quantities than in pop music.
Building an audience
But it is easy to believe her when she says that fame has never been one of her driving forces.
“There’s always another step you can do, another level of renown you can accomplish, but it’s kind of a mystery how to do that,” she said. “And I don’t do it for popularity but I do it to build the audience for classical music, so we can continue to have this audience in the future, so that performances continue to be as complete an experience as they are now.”
In addition to being one of the most technically gifted and passionate violinists around, she possesses an appealing, down-to-earth sensibility and a genuine interest in people of all kinds.
Just watch her after every concert, when she signs copies of albums no matter how tired she might be and appears to genuinely enjoy talking with everyone who seeks her out.
“I just try to interact with the audience a lot,” she said. “I really value them as part of the performing experience.
“I really want to have as many people there as possible, in order to enhance the performance, because the audience is really part of the interpretation in any concert.
“I don’t know if the audience feels it, but onstage, you definitely sense their presence and their reaction to the music in some odd way.”
Longtime partners
Because Hahn is just 25 years old, it is hard to imagine that she is old enough for a longtime partnership with anyone. Yet she and Zhu, who met at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, have been performing together for a dozen years.
“It’s a good half my life,” Hahn said. “You just start by doing one little performance, and then you like working together, and you do another and another and another, and before you know it, time has passed.”
Although the two musicians have teamed with other players, the two have collaborated more with each other than they have anyone else, developing a deep artistic and personal bond in the process.
“First of all, you work together with someone for that long, because it works, and you wouldn’t put yourselves through that if it were a horrible experience,” Hahn said.
In addition to the unconventional mode of transportation, the duo’s program gives this tour another unusual cachet. It includes a couple of familiar works, but most of the imaginative lineup is devoted to rarely heard repertoire.
As a kind of overarching theme, Hahn has picked works by composers who were all famous as violin virtuosos or teachers, starting with the celebrated Belgian violinist Eugène Ysaye, who was her violin teacher’s teacher.
She will perform his Sonata No.1 in G minor for Solo Violin, Op.27, No.1, a piece that harkens back to Bach’s famous works for the instrument without accompaniment.
Next will come the gypsy-flavored Violin Sonata No.3 in A minor, Op.25, by Romanian composer George Enescu, and Nathan Milstein’s “Paganiniana for Violin,” a tribute to the celebrated 19th century virtuoso Nicolò Paganini.
Rounding the program will be Violin Sonata in G major, K.301, by Mozart, who was a violinist as well as a pianist, and a less directly related piece, Ludwig van Beethoven’s Violin Sonata No.3 in E flat major, Op. 12, No.3.
“It’s kind of a violinist’s program but it’s strong for the pianist as well,” Hahn said.
It’s time to watch the road. The Hilary and Natalie show is coming to town.
Fine arts critic Kyle MacMillan can be reached at 303-820-1675 or kmacmillan@denverpost.com.
