Hilary Hahn

Hilary Hahn (born November 27, 1979) is an American violinist. A three-time Grammy Award winner, she has performed throughout the world as a soloist with leading orchestras and conductors, and as a recitalist. She is an avid supporter of contemporary classical music, and several composers have written works for her, including concerti by Edgar Meyer and Jennifer Higdon, partitas by Antón García Abril, two serenades for violin and orchestra by Einojuhani Rautavaara, and a violin and piano sonata by Lera Auerbach.

Hahn was born in Lexington, Virginia, on November 27, 1979, and grew up in the Baltimore, Maryland, area. Her father, Steve Hahn, was a journalist and librarian; her paternal great-grandmother was from Bad Dürkheim in Germany. Her mother, Anne, was an accountant.

A musically precocious child, Hahn began playing the violin one month before her fourth birthday in the Suzuki Program of Baltimore's Peabody Institute. She studied using the Suzuki method until age five before studying in Baltimore under Klara Berkovich from 1985 to 1990.

In 1990, at age ten, she was admitted to the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, where she studied for seven years with Jascha Brodsky, who had been a student of Eugène Ysaÿe. She learned the études of Kreutzer, Ševčík, Gaviniès and Rode, Paganini's Caprices, 28 violin concertos, and chamber works and assorted showpieces.

At 16 she completed the Curtis Institute's university requirements, but she remained for an additional three years to pursue elective courses until her graduation in May 1999 with a Bachelor of Music degree. During this time she studied violin with Jaime Laredo and studied chamber music with Felix Galimir and Gary Graffman.

She also spent four summers in the total-immersion language programs in German, French, and Japanese at Middlebury College.

On December 21, 1991, at age 12, Hahn made her major orchestral debut with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. Soon thereafter she debuted with the Philadelphia Orchestra, Cleveland Orchestra, Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra and the New York Philharmonic. She made her international debut in 1994 performing the Bernstein Serenade in Hungary with Ivan Fischer and the Budapest Festival Orchestra. Her German debut came in 1995 with a performance of the Beethoven Violin Concerto with Lorin Maazel and the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra. The concert was broadcast in Europe.

In 1996, she debuted at Carnegie Hall in New York City as a soloist with the Philadelphia Orchestra, playing Saint-Saens's third violin concerto. In a 1999 interview with Strings Magazine, she cited people influential to her development as a musician and a student, including David Zinman, the conductor of the Baltimore Symphony and Hahn's mentor since she was ten, and Lorin Maazel, with whose Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra she performed in Europe.