Hilary HahnHilary Hahn

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 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 23 feature recordings have received every critical prize in the international press. She is currently visiting professor at the Royal Academy of Music, after several years as the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s first-ever Artist-in-Residence, Artist-in-Residence at the New York Philharmonic, Visiting Artist at the Juilliard School, and Curating Artist of the Dortmund Festival.

In the 2024–25 season, Hahn tours the globe: in Japan, Beethoven with the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen; in the U.S., Korngold with the Berlin Philharmonic; throughout Europe, Tchaikovsky with the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France; throughout Spain and the Canary Islands, Mendelssohn with the Munich Philharmonic; on tour with the National Symphony Orchestra; and at the BBC Proms in Korea. In addition, she joins the Cleveland Orchestra, New York Philharmonic, San Francisco Symphony, and many others. She also continues her immensely popular all-Bach solo recitals in Cincinnati and Philadelphia.

Hahn has personally commissioned and championed works by a diverse array of more than 40 living composers, including Steven Banks, Jennifer Higdon, Jessie Montgomery, and Carlos Simon. Her 2021 recording ‘Paris’ features the world premiere recording of Einojuhani Rautavaara’s ‘Deux Sérénades’, a piece written for Hahn and which she premiered in 2019. Other recent commissions include Michael Abels’s ‘Isolation Variation’, Hahn’s recording of which was nominated for a Grammy; Barbara Assiginaak’s ‘Sphynx Moth’; Lera Auerbach’s Sonata No. 4 ‘Fractured Dreams’, and ‘6 Partitas’ by Antón García Abril. García Abril, Auerbach, and Rautavaara were among the 27 composers who contributed to ‘In 27 Pieces: the Hilary Hahn Encores’, Hahn’s Grammy Award-winning multi-year commissioning project.

Hahn has related to her fans naturally from the very beginning of her career. She has committed to 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 outreach. Her social media-based initiative, #100daysofpractice, has transformed practice into a community-building celebration of artistic development; since Hahn created the hashtag in 2017, fellow performers and students have contributed more than one million posts. A former Suzuki student, she released new recordings of the first three books of the Suzuki Violin School in 2020. In 2019, she released a book of sheet music for ‘In 27 Pieces: the Hilary Hahn Encores’, which includes her own fingerings and bowings and performance notes for each work.

Hahn is a prolific and celebrated recording artist whose feature albums on Decca, Deutsche Grammophon, and Sony have all opened in the top ten of the Billboard charts. Recent releases include ‘Night After Night’, a collection of James Newton Howard’s scores for the films of M. Night Shyamalan, for which Hahn reprised her contributions to his score for The Village; and a recording of Ysaÿe’s six sonatas for solo violin, which saw Hahn celebrate her artistic lineage as a student of Ysaÿe’s former pupil. Three of Hahn’s albums—her 2003 Brahms and Stravinsky concerto disc, a 2008 pairing of Schoenberg and Sibelius concerti, and her 2013 recording of ‘In 27 Pieces: the Hilary Hahn Encores’—have been awarded Grammys. Jennifer Higdon’s Violin Concerto, which was composed for Hahn and which she recorded in 2008, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize.

Hahn is the recipient of numerous awards and recognitions. In recent seasons, she received the Avery Fisher Prize, was named Musical America’s Artist of the Year for 2023, delivered the keynote speech of the Second Annual Women in Classical Music Symposium, received the 2021 Herbert von Karajan award, and was awarded the eleventh Annual Glasshütte Original Music Festival Award, which she donated to the Philadelphia-based music education nonprofit Project 440. 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.

SEASON 2024/2025