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    Review: Gustavo Dudamel Saves the Day at the Philharmonic

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    Dudamel, the New York Philharmonic’s incoming music and artistic director, stepped in after a guest conductor fell ill.It was lucky that Gustavo Dudamel was in town.On April 20, the New York Philharmonic announced that Juanjo Mena, who was scheduled to conduct the orchestra in three sold-out concerts starting on Thursday, had fallen ill. Dudamel, the ensemble’s incoming music and artistic director, was already expecting to be around to lead the spring gala on Wednesday.And so he saved the day. Stepping in for Mena, Dudamel, who assumes his Philharmonic post in 2026, led, in his only subscription concert appearances this season, a dichotomous program of dazzling crowd-pleasers and a thorny modernist work with utmost finesse. Pieces by Ravel and Pablo de Sarasate shone as they should, and the evening’s unlikely centerpiece, Ginastera’s Violin Concerto, was a 30-minute fever dream of serialist fancies and ferocities. (“Ibéria,” from Debussy’s “Images for Orchestra,” was cut after Mena bowed out.)An evening built from Spanish-tinged French pieces could have slipped into fiery and fragrant clichés, but instead it demonstrated the musical values that the Philharmonic’s audience can expect from Dudamel, including snappy rhythms, neatly managed transitions and fortes so punchy, they could leave a mark on your cheek. Orchestral tuttis had clarity and body from top to bottom.Dudamel used Ravel’s exquisite interplay of instrumental timbres to enliven the moods of “Rapsodie Espagnole,” which opened the concert. Sharply vivid rather than suggestively chimerical, the scenes and dances had a trim, finely honed character. Dudamel’s clockwork sophistication was better suited to the concert’s closer, Ravel’s beloved “Boléro,” in which he methodically developed tonal richness, sculpted the sound and dialed up the intensity over the piece’s 15-minute span. The sudden, layered climax had the effect of a tsunami: hitting and washing over the auditorium at the same time.The Philharmonic, which Dudamel will lead more frequently next season before officially undertaking his duties, is already showing signs of his influence. And he collaborated seamlessly with the evening’s soloist, the violinist Hilary Hahn, the orchestra’s artist in residence.A musician of poise and rounded tone, Hahn proved in the Ginastera that she can make just about anything sound beautiful. In her interpretation, the piece shed its acrid angularity. She folded trills, stops and sweet harmonics into unbroken lines, and when she harmonized with herself, she utilized the plushness and patience familiar from her Bach recordings.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Hilary Hahn Announced as Avery Fisher Prize Winner at Philharmonic Concert

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      The star violinist’s appearance as artist in residence included an announcement that she had received the $100,000 Avery Fisher Prize.After the concerto, after the encore, there was still more business to take care of when Hilary Hahn appeared with the New York Philharmonic on Thursday.She returned to the stage of David Geffen Hall, joined by Deborah Borda, the orchestra’s former leader, and Gary Ginstling, its current one. They had an announcement to make: Hahn — at 44 a star violinist for four decades — had been awarded the Avery Fisher Prize, a $100,000 honor that rewards the good citizens of classical music who have complemented artistic excellence with lasting contributions to the field.Those contributions are varied but often affirm the vitality of the art form. The violinist Midori, who won in 2001, tours like a roving artist in residence, working with young musicians in small towns far from music capitals like Boston and New York; the flutist Claire Chase, the 2017 winner, is a passionate educator at work on a decades-long project to modernize her instrument’s repertoire; and the cellist Yo-Yo Ma (1978) — well, what isn’t he doing?Even as a teenager, Hahn was much more than a prodigy. She has always made herself accessible to fans, whether entertaining the longest of autograph lines or letting the public in on her practice sessions on social media. (If you come across #100daysofpractice on Instagram or TikTok, she started that.) She has been a prolific commissioner who insists on recording the works she premieres. And her community engagement, like her “Bring Your Own Baby” concerts for parents and their infants, is as endearing as it is genuinely valuable.If only there were more than just a taste of all this at the Philharmonic, where Hahn is the artist in residence this season. Thursday’s performance was the first in a series that will include one more subscription program, an evening of Bach solo works and a Nightcap show with the New York City Ballet principal dancer Tiler Peck.Hahn has done much more in the same post at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, where she has been in residence since the 2021-22 season. There, she has collaborated with local youth initiatives, and revived her “Bring Your Own Baby” concerts. Her encore from Thursday, Steven Banks’s “Through My Mother’s Eyes,” was written for her time in Chicago.At the Philharmonic, we just get Hahn the performer. Which, to be fair, is quite something. Her account of Prokofiev’s First Violin Concerto exemplified the golden-age richness and astonishing technique that have long made her a standout in a crowded field. She handles her instrument like a great soprano handles her voice, with muscular lyricism and a luminously penetrating sound capable of reaching the farthest seats at a whisper.There was a sense of that deceptive softness in a whistling trill near the end of the piece, and as she generously partnered with members of the orchestra: her strumming paired with the wandering melody of Anthony McGill’s clarinet; her muted twinkle adding new color to the opening theme as it flowed from Robert Langevin’s flute.Elsewhere in the concerto, the orchestra plays a largely supportive role. And it was sensitively balanced yet sufficiently distinct under the baton of Jakub Hrusa, a guest conductor who tends to tame and enliven the Philharmonic’s forceful sound, with a feeling for dramatic shape that befits his recent appointment to the podium of the Royal Opera House in London.The ensemble was both larger and more showcased in the evening’s opening work, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s “Ballade,” from 1898, which had its Philharmonic debut on Thursday. Some in the audience might have been unfamiliar with this chronically underprogrammed composer, but his alluringly chromatic score had much to please them: the lush orchestration of Brahms and Romantic gestures of Tchaikovsky, tightly packaged with the breathlessness of a Dvorak concert overture.Naturally more of a showcase for the players, though, was Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra, a beloved reimagining of the Baroque concerto grosso for the 20th century. In a work obsessively precise in its construction — a love letter to sonata and arch forms that unfurls as a roll call of virtuosity — the Philharmonic and Hrusa were freely organic and sounded revelrous, with smiles accompanying the parodic passages of the fourth-movement Intermezzo interrotto.It was touching for the Bartok to follow the announcement of Hahn’s award. Because while workaday musicians might not have the glamour of a star soloist, they are no less essential to the ecosystem. Not for nothing does McGill, the Philharmonic’s principal clarinet, have an Avery Fisher Prize, too.New York PhilharmonicThis program repeats through Saturday at David Geffen Hall, Manhattan; nyphil.org. More

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      Hilary Hahn Practices in Public, Wherever and However She Is

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      BOSTON — Backstage at Symphony Hall here on a recent afternoon, Hilary Hahn opened her violin case and took out her instrument.She flipped it up to her chin, then paced around; she was warming up to play Bach for a group of Boston Symphony Orchestra staffers, as a run-through before she set out on a tour that continues in Los Angeles and Chicago this week. For the moment, she was trying to break in a new set of strings, as any violinist might.She paused. She set her pink-cased iPhone down to face her, having scouted the dressing room for an angle, then turned on its camera and pressed record. She played her Vuillaume violin toward the lens, but not exactly for it. She let it watch while she tuned and tuned again; while she repeated tricky little passages; while she sighed, composing herself. She stopped it when she was done.Hahn edited the video down to a bit more than a minute of unflashy content then posted it, with all the brisk efficiency of a social media intern, to Twitter, Instagram and TikTok. There were no retakes, no notes to her publicist. Season 6, Day 61, of #100daysofpractice was in the can.“I make a point of not picking up the part of the practice that is impressive,” Hahn, 43, said in an interview afterward. “I pick out the part that’s the actual work, where I know I was in the zone, and I wasn’t thinking about anything else.”Hahn, the artist-in-residence at the Chicago Symphony, has long thought about her role in broader terms than many superstar soloists. She has commissioned works including garlanded concertos and brief encores; taped Suzuki exercises for young students to aspire to; and given recitals for babies (all right, their parents). And this prodigy turned pre-eminence is an experienced poster, too: For years, she tweeted in the voice of her violin case.Even so, #100daysofpractice has become an unexpected phenomenon. Social media statistics are notoriously unreliable, but the hashtag counts 800,000 posts on Instagram alone, and has brought amateurs and professionals alike into a community of musicians who, for their own reasons and in their own ways, post part of their daily routine. Drawing back the veil on how musicians work when they are not onstage, Hahn is trying to relieve at least some of the negativity that can surround a crucial — yet traditionally private and largely untaught — element of a musical life.Hahn’s practice videos tend to be recorded where they can be — whether on the road, in a hotel room or at home.Sophie Park for The New York Times“I make a point of not picking up the part of the practice that is impressive,” Hahn said.Sophie Park for The New York TimesHahn came up with the idea in 2017, when she first noticed #The100DayProject, an initiative that asked creative, primarily visual artists to make something, day after day. She chose an activity that she thought she should have been undertaking with a similar commitment to regularity, but was not.“I desperately wanted to get reposted, get attention,” Hahn, laughing, recalled of a time when her social-media presence was not as formidable as it is now. “I didn’t get reposted at all, I was like: ‘I’m here! I’m doing something innovative! I’m boring my fans! Notice me!’”On one level, Hahn’s posts since are a diary of a virtuoso’s life. There’s Hahn at the Teatro La Fenice in Venice, at Wigmore Hall in London, at David Geffen Hall in New York, where she recently became the first artist to play a solo recital in the refurbished main theater. There’s Hahn on a private jet, in a hotel, and in another, and another. There’s Hahn in her Cambridge, Mass., home, with her Grammys on a side table or her guinea pigs behind her. There’s Hahn the working mother, playing with one of her two children as her impromptu accompanist, or stealing a quiet moment after midnight, exhausted.Part of Hahn’s message, she said, is that being deliberate about practice, whatever else might be going on in life, allows marginal gains to compound. That opportunity for accountability and self-discipline has attracted other soloists to join in. The pianist Dan Tepfer said that he adopted the hashtag this year to recommit to daily practice, after a grueling, monthslong tour.“I like to say that if your practicing isn’t a practice, you’re not practicing,” Tepfer said. “It truly is a practice, it’s a daily activity, and the power of practicing comes with that kind of continuity.”Hahn practicing on the stage of Symphony Hall in Boston.Sophie Park for The New York TimesHahn initially saw the project along similar lines, and to an extent still does. But as she read the replies to her posts, and spoke with fans after concerts, she saw that the posts were being interpreted as a statement about the need for musicians to accept imperfections and embrace their vulnerabilities — or as a challenge to “the toxic mentality around practice,” as she put it.“We’re just so often in classical music, really trained to beat ourselves up until we get it right, on our own,” Hahn said. “I compare it to walking into a room by yourself, and you’re looking in a mirror, and you’re having to pick out everything that’s wrong with you, and then fix it, with no ability to fix it. You’re supposed to walk out better. And it’s just such an impossible thing. You actually just walk out with all these ideas in your head of what’s wrong with you.”“I realized that we need to have a lot more self-compassion as musicians,” she added. “You can’t become someone you’re not in practice, and you can’t make the music become something that it’s not ready to be. It’s just difficult, though, to reconcile that with expectations, sometimes.”Hahn’s most powerful videos are not those in which she tosses off some Bach with all her familiar assurance, but those in which she does least with her instrument. “Practice” turns out to mean all kinds of things, from listening back to past concerts to doing near-silent left-hand studies while the laundry whirs along. But it can also mean mindfully taking a day off, or acknowledging feeling burned out, and responding appropriately.“I know some people say that’s not practice,” Hahn said on the video for Day 34 of last year’s series. “Can you count that as practice? But it is about the practice of long-term practicing, that mentality that it is — it’s a lifestyle. There’s a consistency to it, and being a consistent practicer doesn’t always mean practicing by data.”Hahn’s videos, she said, challenge “the toxic mentality around practice.”Sophie Park for The New York TimesMany of Hahn’s admirers have taken that lesson about mindfulness to heart. Another violinist, Elena Urioste, tried the project two years ago, and “promptly failed on my third day,” she wrote on Instagram. She responded with her own hashtag, #ErraticDaysofPractice.The rising violinist and hashtag devotee Nancy Zhou said that Hahn “positively reinforces the whole practice culture and what it should be,” and that she was “completely confident” that the star has had an influence.“It makes them start thinking,” Zhou said of colleagues she had talked with, “about, well, how can they more deeply and more forgivingly look at the way they practice?”Hahn said that series has been useful to her own routine, though it took her time “to be at one with the public and the private aspects of it.” And there have been periods when filming — or writing analytically about it — has interfered with practice itself. The series eventually dispelled a “cycle of commentary” that fixated on how she played “perfectly,” she said, denying that that was her intention.But even if Hahn sees her posts as modeling just one possible approach — practice isn’t perfect — and certainly not as lessons in how to practice or play the violin, she has come to accept what she calls their “greater purpose.” She has no plans to stop them just yet.“As a student, I never saw someone practice,” Hahn said. “I would sort of illegally listen to the wall, or even if I would poke my head into the window to see who was there, then you would duck down. You know, you tried to listen a little bit.”“We had no idea how people achieved what they achieved,” she continued, “and the fact that people have embraced the project, started doing it themselves, they’re getting comfortable posting stuff that isn’t polished — it feels like maybe the idea was mine, but the game changer is the pickup of this community.” More

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      Two Gems of June: Premieres at Carnegie Hall and Harlem School of the Arts

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      The festival circuit may be getting underway but the city offers fine fare with programs of work by Sarah Kirkland Snider and Adegoke Steve Colson.This month, you might feel the momentum in classical music swinging to the domestic festival circuit, with splashy premieres and revivals coming courtesy of Spoleto, Ojai and the Opera Theater of St. Louis. But New York isn’t finished yet, either.Two premieres here over the weekend — one loudly trumpeted and one that enjoyed comparatively little fanfare — were newsworthy and enjoyable on their own terms, while also serving as reminders not to neglect the city’s June calendar.Along with the New York Philharmonic’s presentations Friday of Barber’s Violin Concerto — featuring the star violinist Hilary Hahn — and Mahler’s Symphony No. 1, the audience at Carnegie Hall heard the premiere of Sarah Kirkland Snider’s 14-minute “Forward Into Light.”The composer Sarah Kirkland Snider, center, with the conductor Jaap van Zweden and the New York Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall on Friday, for the premiere of her work “Forward Into Light.”Chris LeeCommissioned by the orchestra as part of its “Project 19” focus on female composers, “Forward Into Light” was inspired by the suffragists Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. With music that was by turns fragile and ferocious — and that also boasted touches of mordant wit — “Light” ably communicated its story about new ideas struggling for space (and for longevity). Spare, ascending motives in the harp anchored some early sections. When the orchestra responded and added in new, consonant melody in turn, there was a sense of material developing through collaboration. Elsewhere, a brief song for clarinet spurred material for other winds. Subsequent interplay, with Minimalist pulses in the violins offset by glissandi in the cellos and basses, recalled the swooning call-and-response arrangements of past Snider works, like “Circe and the Hanged Man,” from her 2010 song cycle “Penelope.”The typically hard-charging Philharmonic music director Jaap van Zweden allowed these moments to breathe. Yet he also relished hairpin turns during which the music throttled into tutti writing. Late in the piece, he managed Snider’s quick dynamic shifts with a Hollywood sound-mixer’s feel for drama.Overall, “Forward” was packed but not overstuffed with historical references, both abstract and concrete. Sometimes Snider’s Sturm und Drang suggested early feminist boldness, or corresponding public sphere controversy. However, a prerecorded sample of Dame Ethel Smyth’s “March of the Women,” late in the piece, didn’t register as strongly as the rest of the music. But even in the densest moments, you could discern Snider’s feel for wry commentary. A few walloping brass passages seemed to offer knowing nods and the subtlest of eye-rolls — as though the characters who inspired this music were aware that the unshakable strengths of the suffrage movement could outlast early, noisy objections.The violinist Hilary Hahn performing Barber’s Violin Concerto on Friday, with van Zweden conducting.Chris LeeAnd so, just as in her ecologically oriented “Mass for the Endangered,” the composer’s intellectual concerns dovetailed smoothly with the lush, inviting score. (The Death of Classical concert series presents Snider’s Mass, Monday through Thursday this week at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn.)It was the beginning of a fine night for the Philharmonic. In partnership with Hahn, the orchestra gave Barber’s violin concerto some thrillingly rough-hewed edges, cutting against its public reputation as lighter fare. And though van Zweden’s over-articulated grimness in the middle sections of Mahler’s symphony came at the expense of the composer’s more colorful twists, the conductor’s handling of the outer movements delivered undeniable galvanic thrills.While the Carnegie crowd received Hahn’s appearance with an ovation befitting her global-star status — and responded to the culmination of the Mahler with fever-pitch satisfaction — they also greeted the new piece with enthusiasm. It all made for a richly satisfying close to the orchestra’s challenging year outside its own auditorium.The next time we hear them indoors, it will be at the newly refurbished, redesigned Geffen Hall, inside Lincoln Center. What they’ll play there, over the next few years, is beginning to come into focus. And as the Philharmonic’s administrators continue to deepen their engagement with music by Black composers, they might have looked uptown on Saturday for a few more ideas.Adegoke Steve Colson’s “Suite Harlem,” a six-movement work, was dedicated to the Harlem School of the Arts and its founder, the soprano Dorothy Maynor.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesKendall McDowell and Jenelle Henry, performed a dance accompaniment in the third movement of Adegoke Steve Colson’s work.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesThe bassist Luke Stewart was part of the octet performing “Suite Harlem.” Each soloist had a chance to shine throughout the piece.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesOn the closing night of the second annual A Train Festival at the Harlem School of the Arts, the pianist and composer Adegoke Steve Colson — a veteran of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (or A.A.C.M.) — presented a 75-minute premiere of a six-movement work. Titled “Suite Harlem,” it was dedicated to the school, and presented in its 120-seat black box theater. Like Snider’s “Forward,” this work was also dedicated to a female pathbreaker: the soprano Dorothy Maynor, who founded this school in the 1960s.Scored for an octet of piano, vocalist, trumpet, bass clarinet, violin, vibraphone, bass and drums, Colson’s music occasionally felt like a thrilling update of the soul jazz tradition — particularly when the composer’s piano took a subtly swinging yet harmonically unpredictable background role. At other points the work had all the high-energy markers of the 1970s avant-garde. And thanks to some stirring playing from the violinist Marlene Rice, the music also proposed a lineage with some of Ellington’s chamber-adjacent music with Ray Nance on violin (as in “Dance No. 3” from the Liberian Suite).During “Searching Harlem,” the first movement of this premiere, the composer’s wife and longtime collaborator and vocalist Iqua Colson gave affecting voice to Maynor’s intentions in founding this institution. She brought crisp intonation to some mournful melodic lines that described the historical dearth of spaces for the neighborhood’s children “to sing or dance or act a part.” And later in the suite, during the explosive, uptempo penultimate movement, “Resilience,” she channeled the fiery sense of artistic expression made possible by the school, with an inventive solo of scat singing. It wasn’t supper-club-style scat, either — but an ingeniously shaped solo, concluding with some darting phrases that earned one of the night’s biggest rounds of applause. It brought to mind the couple’s long and fruitful collaboration, going back to 1980s releases like “Triumph!” and “No Reservation.”The interdisciplinary nature of the school — and of the A.A.C.M. itself — was brought into enjoyable focus thanks to contributions by students, during the third movement (“Our Beautiful Children”). Two dancers, Kendall McDowell and Jenelle Henry, provided fluid accompaniment to funk-inflected rhythms of the percussionist Pheeroan akLaff and the bassist Luke Stewart.Adegoke Steve Colson shined especially bright in the suite’s final half.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesEvery soloist had a chance to shine, throughout the piece. But Adegoke Steve Colson’s piano playing in the suite’s final half was a cut above this generally high standard: densely avant-garde and joyously singing in equal measure. This solo aspect of his art has been only rarely heard on recordings — like “Tones for” (2015) — so it was a treat to hear him in this manner, in the suite.The music of the Montclair, N.J.-based Colson, who is now 72, is not as well known as that of his A.A.C.M. contemporaries like Henry Threadgill. But there’s still time to give him more airings in New York. “Suite Harlem” was the climactic result of his time as an artist in residence at the school in Harlem. Given his pedagogical bent, perhaps Carnegie could commission a chamber work from him, for its young professional group Ensemble Connect. And a revival of his large-scale opus dedicated to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., “ … as in a Cultural Reminiscence …” might also fit in Carnegie’s Zankel Hall space.For now, this weekend’s performances were reminder enough of the veteran’s long contribution to music, and of Snider’s emergent career. The back-to-back relationship of their premieres on the calendar was a reminder, too, of the city’s aggregate cultural riches. Even if relatively few concert halls are flexible enough to combine these complementary artistic communities under a single roof, sagacious concertgoers can still plot their own course through New York’s venues, in any season. More

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      A Composer’s Notes Echo After His Death

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyA Composer’s Notes Echo After His DeathThe violinist Hilary Hahn has released the premiere recording of two serenades by Einojuhani Rautavaara, who died in 2016.“The audience was so quiet throughout the whole premiere,” the violinist Hilary Hahn said of the new Rautavaara works. “We all felt that these notes will never be new again.”Credit…Daniel Dorsa for The New York TimesMarch 5, 2021When the Finnish composer Einojuhani Rautavaara died in 2016, at 87, a voice of rare lyricism in contemporary music fell silent. His death severed a link to the past: Rautavaara had been a protégé of Sibelius, Finland’s master composer, and one of the pallbearers at his funeral in 1957. Rautavaara’s music, too, conjured the past. Though he entertained some modernist techniques, at core his style was seductively, if idiosyncratically, Romantic.This week, he has delivered an unexpected posthumous greeting. A new album, “Paris,” by the star violinist Hilary Hahn and the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, features two gleaming serenades — one addressed to love, the other to life — that were the last pieces he wrote. Hahn said in an interview that when she heard of their existence, it felt like receiving “a letter from the beyond.”“We thought there wasn’t anything else,” she added. “And he left us this gift.”The gift was intended for Hahn. In 2014 she had performed Rautavaara’s soaring Violin Concerto, written in the 1970s, with the Radio France orchestra. She was so taken by the piece that she told the ensemble’s Finnish music director, Mikko Franck, that she wanted to commission another concerto from him.Franck agreed to broach the subject, though he knew Rautavaara’s health had been fragile since he suffered a ruptured aorta in 2004. When they spoke, Rautavaara said he did not want to write another concerto, but that he was drawn to the idea of a suite of serenades. The conversation ended inconclusively, and Franck and Hahn came to believe the project had fallen victim to Rautavaara’s weakened condition. Another work for violin and orchestra, “Fantasia,” written for Anne Akiko Meyers and completed in 2015, appeared to be his final composition.Hahn wanted to commission a new work by Rautavaara, but the project seemed to have fallen victim to his weakened condition in his final years.Credit…John McConnico for The New York TimesAfter Rautavaara’s funeral, his widow, Sinikka, took Franck aside and showed him the manuscript of two serenades for violin and orchestra. “Serenade to My Love” was complete; for “Serenade to Life,” the solo violin part had been finished, but the sketches for the orchestra cut off near the end, as if in midsentence. Franck noted that the titles for the pieces were in both Finnish and French; they were clearly intended for Hahn and Franck’s Paris-based orchestra.The composer Kalevi Aho, a student of Rautavaara’s, completed the orchestration, and in February 2019 Hahn and Franck performed the serenades in Paris. “The audience was so quiet throughout the whole premiere,” Hahn said. “We all felt that these notes will never be new again.”In fact, there are few truly new notes in these un-self-consciously rhapsodic pieces. Rather, they sublimate themes from earlier Rautavaara vocal works, weaving a web of memory and longing. One source he drew on was a set of serenades for male a cappella choir from the 1970s — one of them addressed to beer. The melody of “Serenade to My Wife,” on a text by Stefan George about the fading glow of late summer, is the blueprint for the searching, self-absorbed solo line in “Serenade to My Love.”“It’s lush despite itself,” Hahn said of the music. On the new album, which also features works by Chausson and Prokofiev, she plays it with luminous tone and sustained intensity, her part soaring above a string orchestra that swells and falters.“Serenade to Life” quotes from Rautavaara’s 1991 opera “The House of the Sun,” a tragicomedy about two Russian aristocrats who die in exile, clinging to dreams of past grandeur. This serenade begins with a slinky and fluid line for the solo violin, complemented by playful woodwinds that give the music an expansive and sociable feel. In the final moments, a frantic, percussive energy takes over and drives the piece to an abrupt ending.Sinikka Rautavaara said in an email that in this final serenade, “the feeling remains that life was too short after all.”Hahn said that in performing a composer’s last works she felt the weight of responsibility, “knowing that we were finishing the things that he had started to say.” The premiere, she added, “was the end of something, but it also felt like a beginning.”“Now the piece is out in the world; it’s almost like a birth,” she said. “The entire catalog is there, and it can become this living legacy.”That first performance is the one captured on the new album. “Everyone onstage felt the significance,” Hahn said. “You are completing a composer’s catalog. There will be no more new notes after this.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More