Hilary Hahn Embraces Short Works in a Big Way

Violinist commissions 27 encore pieces for two-year stage and studio project

HILARY HAHN fans will soon have 27 more reasons to bring the Grammy Award-wirming violinist back onstage. The 31-year-old soloist is commissioning and premiering encores for violin and piano from 27 composers during the 2011-12 and 2012-13 seasons, The project, aptly titled In 27 Pieces: The Hilary Hahn Encores, aims to expand and expose the shorter works of contemporary classical music and will culminate in an album.

The composers include Jennifer Higdon, Krysztof Penderecki, David Del Tredici, David Lang, Max Richter, Lera Auerbach, and Edgar Meyer, among others. In an added twist, Hahn is keeping th� 27th composer a secret, which she'll reveal later this year.

Though Hahn insisted that each encore last between one-and-a-half minutes and five minutes, the composers are free to create whatever they think the virtuoso and her longtime accompanying pianist, Valentina Lisitsa, can handle. "Each piece will be its own musical world," Hahn says. "It could be [the composers') own typical styles, they could do something completely different, they could be fast, slow - 'whatever they want to write - [Lisitsa] can play anything."

The process of choosing contributors required Hahn to spend hours listening to CDs and scouring the Internet for new music. The violinist estimates she listened to hundreds of composers. Keeping the pool at 27 proved an arduous affair. "It's by no means meant to be the definitive sampling or anything like that," Hahn says of her collaborators. "It's more, each piece is personal for me and each piece has its own personality. I needed to make sure that I had enough people to represent what I was interested in, but I also did not want to get so many that each person lost their own identity in the project.

"There are a lot of things that I heard that intrigued me, but you can't choose everything. In essence, it was the stuff that I remembered the next day and the day after that and the day after that in the back of my mind - just the things that stuck with me."

Hahn's previous ventures in commissioning contemporary classical works yielded violin concertos from Higdon and Meyer. The Higdon concerto garnered the composer the 2010 Pulitzer Prize in music. "It was great to be a small part of the excitement," Hahn says.

Half of the encore project will be presented in each season, and the short pieces will be incorporated into the body of the overall program. "It's going to be interesting to live with so many different pieces at one time, so many new things," Hahn says.

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Hilary Hahn maintains that it is a coincidence that she chose 27 composers for the project and that her birthday lands on November 27.