Grammy Award-winning Violinist Returns To Perform With NZSO

American virtuoso violinist Hilary Hahn returns to Aotearoa for the first time in more than a decade to perform three extraordinary works with the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra in August.

Hahn, a three-time Grammy Award winner, is considered one of the best violinists in the world. She last performed with the NZSO on its triumphant European tour in 2010.

Hailed “a virtuoso with a 21st-century sensibility” by Time magazine, Hahn performs with leading orchestras, is a prolific recording artist, and a champion of breaking down traditional barriers to classical performances. She has also collaborated with alt-rockers …And You Will Know Us By The Trail of Dead, and folk-rock artists Tom Brosseau and Josh Ritter.

Gramophone magazine declared her most recent album Paris, recorded with the Radio France Philharmonic Orchestra, one of the best classical albums of 2021.

Hahn performs three concerts in Wellington and one performance in Auckland as part of the NZSO’s Immerse 2022 festival in Association with nzherald.co.nz and supported by NZSO Fortissimo donor Luke Pierson. The Orchestra will be led by acclaimed New Zealander Gemma New in her first concerts as the NZSO’s Artistic Advisor and Principal Conductor.

In the NZSO’s Truth and Beauty concerts in Wellington and Auckland, Hahn performs Prokofiev’s Violin Concerto No. 1, which she calls “a wild ride”.

For her performance of Brahms’ Violin Concerto in Style and Substance in Wellington, Hahn says his masterpiece is a unique combination of “brute force and gentle emotion”. French composer Ernest Chausson’s Poème, which Hahn performs in Love Triumphant in Wellington, is a favourite of the musician. She says its opening phrase is one of the most beautiful of any piece of music ever written.

In addition, the NZSO’s Immerse 2022 festival concerts in August feature music by two New Zealand composers, renowned veteran John Rimmer and rising star Tabea Squire.

Audiences will also be enthralled by four monumental works from 1888 to 2005. Rimsky-Korsakov’s Sheherazade and Ravel’s Ma Mere L’Oye Suite (Mother Goose Suite) were both inspired by universally-loved folk tales. Shostakovich’s tour de force Symphony No. 5 was written in the midst of Stalin’s brutal purges, and John Adams’ haunting Doctor Atomic Symphony is from the opera about the creation of the first atomic bomb.

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