It is a bit surprising that
Hilary Hahn
has never recorded the
Six Sonatas for solo violin, Op. 27
, until now. She was a student of
Jascha Brodsky
, who was
Ysaye
's last student, and more than any other violinist active today, she maintains the traditions of the great Belgian school. Maybe she was just waiting for the time and opportunity to do the sonatas proud; she recorded them in late 2022. Whatever the case, it has been worth the wait: these are thrilling performances that step out onto the knife's edge and never retreat. It is not just that
Hahn
handles the technical demands flawlessly -- the fierce double stops of the first movement of the
first sonata
, the various Bachian fugues, and the timbre shifts in the "Dawn" movement of the
fifth sonata
. It is that she seems to step into the personality of
. The sonatas feint toward referring to
Bach
's unaccompanied violin sonatas and even quote them, but more important is that each sonata is dedicated to one of
's violinistic contemporaries, and
steps into the styles of these (
Joseph Szigeti
,
Jacques Thibaud
George Enescu
Fritz Kreisler
Mathieu Crickboom
, and
Manuel Quiroga
) and makes them vividly different. Listeners will have to decide for themselves about
Deutsche Grammophon
's sound, recorded in a Boston radio station studio. It places the listener right up next to
, which is not exactly idiomatic for these big, public works but is viscerally exciting, capturing all the miraculous shades of her violin. In any event, here is a violin recording that has the commanding power of the violin's golden age of a century ago. It made classical best-seller charts in the summer of 2023. ~ James Manheim