Twenty-four and Still Growing

Despite all my best intentions I'm afraid I've seriously neglected this blog of late. Yes, though I've heard the masses crying out for more posts and the mind is always willing, the clock and the calender simply haven't made proper allowances. In fact, I don't really have the time for a post tonight, but this news item was so good that I had to get it posted.

If you've read this blog at all then you know that I've been quite a fan of the young German violinist Julia Fischer. In the past I've said that she is probably the best of an army of very talented young violinists now appearing on CD and on the concert stage, and I even predicted that if you haven't heard of her before you almost certainly will in the future.

Well, she took an enormous step toward classical music superstardom today because it was just announced that at age 24, Julia Fischer has won the prestigious Classic FM Gramaphone 2007 Artist of the Year award. Now, some will quibble as to the importance of this or any other award, and I have to admit that this whole practice of ranking artists seems a little contrived to me, (who was better - Rembrandt or Van Gough?), but the fact that Fischer should beat out names such as Barenboim, Abbado, Gergiev and Terfel and be recognized as among the very best speaks for itself.

So, a short post and a hearty congratulations to Julia Fischer - the Classic FM Gramaphone Artist of the Year. Damn girl, that is so cool.

Calendar Notes

The SF Symphony announced their 2007-08 season this week, and it was a little controversial. For the first time(?) the SF Symphony will be giving a free concert in San Jose, which has rankled some of the local California Symphony musicians who worry that such an appearance will syphon off some of their audience. It's all a bunch of bull, of course. The SF Symphony has been making appearances in the South Bay for years, and is considered by most people to be every bit as local as the California Symphony, but a free concert does stir things up a bit.

I don't care about any of that. When the season was announced I, like most people who are interested in such things, immediately searched the list of soloists to see who would be making an appearance this year. In fact, I was most interested in one particular soloist, and lo and behold, there she was.

So yes, the good news is that Julia Fischer will be playing Sibelius with Michael Tilson-Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony. The bad news is that she will be making that appearance in Europe as part of the Symphony's late summer European tour. No date has been given but odds are I won't be hopping aboard a 747 just to see it. Deborah Voigt and Yefim Bronfman are also appearing with the Symphony on that tour, so it appears she's going to be in good company.

But wait, lucky for us Fischer will also be making a Bay Area appearance in November as part of the Symphony's Great Performer Series. These are a series of performances held throughout the season, each featuring some of the classical music world's, well, "great performers." The 2006-07 season features names such as Garrick Ohlsson, Murray Perahia, Christoph Eschenbach, Susan Graham, etc..., and it looks like they will bringing in more of the top players for 07/08, including the aforementioned Julia Fischer.

Unfortunately, she won't be appearing with MTT for her American performance, but will be playing with Yuri Temirkanov and the St. Petersburg Philharmonic instead. Still sounds good to me, and she'll be playing Beethoven as well, the same piece that was named one of the 10 best performances of 2006 by ionarts. Looking forward to that one.

And one more bit of Julia Fischer news. The lineup for this summer's Aspen Music Festival (registration required) was also announced this week, and it looks like she'll be appearing there too. No suprise since it seems that just about everybody in the music world manages to make it out to the Aspen Festival, and this year that will include jazz and pop artists as well. Fischer will be performing the Violin Concerto by Nicholas Maw, which I'm completely unfamiliar with but understand was written for Joshua Bell. In fact it's available on Rhapsody so maybe I'll give it a listen. Hmmm, is it worth a trip to Colorado? Nah, I'll just wait for November.

Well, that's all I've got tonight. Really I just wanted an excuse to post more pictures. Aren't you glad you stopped by?

The Other Man's Grass is Always Greener

What's suprising about Julia Fischer's 2005 release of "J.S. Bach's Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin" is not the musicianship or quality of her playing. As I posted last week, Fischer is a rising star in a very crowded field of talented violinsts. No, what is suprising is that here, in 2007, ten years after its release, the finest recording of Bach Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin still remains the 1997 release by a very young Hilary Hahn. You would think that in the intervening decade someone would come along and top it, but no one has.

Not that Julia Fischer doesn't try. She has all the qualities I like best in a violinist - a lack of flash and showiness, and a determination to let the music speak for itself rather than speak for it. Yet on this recording Fischer seems uncharacteristically heavy-handed and thick, with a tendency towards overdramatics, showing none of Hilary Hahn's understated grace, elegance or intelligence. When Hahn plays Back it's like the notes come off the page straight to my ears with no human in between, but at times Fischer's Bach seems to strain at the effort. I'm sure it was not Fischer's intent, but this CD just made me want to back to my collection and remember how good that early Hahn effort was.

In fact, hearing Hahn's Solo Bach made me want to go back and listen to all of her recordings again (I own all of them). Man, what an amazing run she had. Her Beethoven, Brahms, Shostakovich, Stravinsky, and Bach Concertos were all some of the best recordings of these works I've ever heard, and her Barber and Elgar have simply never been equalled.

Her Barber, in particular, made with Hugh Wolff, is really the only Barber Violin Concerto worth having. Believe me, I haven't listened to 'em all, but I've listened to quite a few, and no other violinist besides Hahn has ever gotten this piece right. It's a 20th century American piece, not a 19th century romantic piece, yet every other violinist seems to want to layer it in goopy sentimentality, particularly the first two movements. I'd suggest that before anyone plays it they listen to Hahn's clean, crisp reading of the piece, and then rethink their approach.

Of course I've written about her Elgar before, so I won't go into it again. I think this is sadly one of the most overlooked releases of the 21st century, and I don't really know why. It's a beautiful piece of incredible depth, one that bears repeated listenings, and yet even Hilary Hahn, when asked to recount the names of her past recordings, forgot to include it. I don't get it. It's probably my favorite CD and the one I asked her to sign when she came to the City last month (ooops, I don't think I was supposed to do that!), but no one else seems to pay it much attention. Maybe it's because the one thing that's never in short supply in the world of classical music is opinions on how something should or shouldn't be played, and sometimes Hahn's distinctive style just might work against her.

Oh well, that just makes it all the sadder to see her lose so much of her focus lately. I don't know, are we coming to the end of Hilary Hahn's classical music career? It sure seems that way. Take, for example, her work on the Trail of Dead CD "World's Apart", a project probably best left unmentioned. I was reading a posting done by one of the TOD bandmembers in which he explained how the band liked to perform their shows while high on ecstasy, a fitting exposition of just how seriously the bandmembers themselves take their own music (I understand that the Berlin Phil similarly likes to get totally trashed before their concert performances). So what's her audience supposed to make of a project like this? What would you say if Gil Shaham or Yo-Yo Ma announced they were going to do a CD with some of their stoner friends? You're gonna WHAT?

And now, as a follow-up to that ill-concieved project, comes Hahn's next CD with folkie Tom Brosseau. Evidently it must be an important undertaking for her because according to her concert schedule she is devoting a lot of time and effort towards promoting it. I don't know Brosseau's music, really, but I have listened to it on the internet. It's not TOD, that's for sure. More like a lot of homespun populism about dusty towns and prairie grass, and how the little people are the salt of the earth and all that. It ain't Dylan or Joni Mitchell, but it ain't bad either. His website says he reads a lot of Steinbeck and that's ok too. Guess he's probably one of those thoughtful, sensitive types who spends a lot of his time staring fix'edly into the middle distance. The Brosseau-Hahn CD hasn't come out yet so there's nothing I can say, but somehow I don't think it's going to be Paganini.

Which brings us back to the question at hand - namely, whither Hilary? Her Mozart CD was a bit of a stumble. The playing was excellent but it lacked the depth of other players like Anne-Sophie Mutter. The Paganini-Spohr CD had a brilliant, and I mean brilliant performance of the Paganini Violin Concerto No. 1, but was brought down a little by a less than inspiring Spohr Violin Concerto No. 8. I understand the personal reasons that Hahn included the Spohr on this CD, reasons she has explained many times, but frankly it's a piece that just doesn't go anywhere. It's a beautiful piece with some difficult passages, but you keep waiting for it to develop some depth or direction, and it just sort of lays there.

Now with her forays into popular music I have to wonder if Hilary Hahn's classical days are coming to an end. It seems impossible to even think of the possiblity, but she's been doing this for a long time, and in my minds eye I can see a person tired and spent and surrounded by promoters and publicists and favor-seekers and all assorted types of hangers-on, and maybe she just feels it's time for her to go on to other things.I don't know, but if I could ask one question of her, if I could sit down with beside her and speak, then...I guess she'd probably squirt me in the face with pepper spray and yell for the police. But before they wrestle me to the ground, I'd ask one favor.

"You know Hilary, I don't know how many CD's you have left on your DG contract, but if this next one is to be your last then why not make it your greatest CD yet. Not just for the sake of your audience who has supported you all these years, and not even for the sake of all the people who've helped you along the way, but for your own sake and for the sake of all the hard work you've put in over the years to get where you are. Make a CD that'll make everyone miss you when you're gone, go out with a bang, and then go pursue your popstar dreams or whatever it is you have in mind. Will you do that Hilary?"

And then they can throw me in jail, but at least I'll have said my piece.

Tags: Hilary, Hahn, Julia, Fischer

And The Winner Is...

The buzz has been building and the day is finally here. The press can stop calling and pounding on my door because I'm ready to announce my 2006 DCM CD of the Year award. I know, my heart is racing too, so without further ado let's get on with it.

In a year crowded with new Mozart releases it's probably fitting that a Mozart CD would win the award this year. Of course, readers of this blog (?) know my obvious bias towards violinists and singers so it should be expected that my CDOTY recipient will be in one of those two categories. Not that weren't many fine pianists and cellists and orchestras putting out new releases in 2006, but, frankly, who cares?

With that in mind, they were really only a couple of CD's that really caught my attention. The first is Anne-Sophie Mutter's amazing 4 CD release of Mozart's violin sonata's. You know, at her worst Mutter can be a little smothering at times, but at her best, which is most often the case, Mutter just may be our best violinist of the current era. She certainly makes a claim to that title with this release which is full of spirit and depth and suprising warmth. Most years this would have been a shoo-in for CDOTY honors except for another Mozart CD that came out by a much younger but equally gifted violinist.

Julia Fischer has been well known among the hardcore classical audience for quite some time now, but it took a while for the news to reach the Luddite's like me who inhabit the musical world's outer fringes. I had heard of her before, but since she records for the relatively small and independent Pentatone label her music is rarely heard on the radio and cannot be found on Itunes or Rhapsody at all. Fortunately, the buzz did reach me and I finally bought one of her CD's, and these past few months not a week has gone past when I haven't listened to it at least once or twice.


"W.A. Mozart Violin Concertos Nos. 1, 2 and 5" is actually a companion to Fischer's earlier 2005 release of the Violin Concertos Nos. 3 and 4, and really the two CD's should be taken as a whole. The critics have described Fischer as "phenomenal" and "breathtaking", but I think I would describe the playing on this CD as spirited and insightful and full of character - perfectly suited to these youthful Mozart pieces.

What really grabs me as a listener, though, is the effortless ease with she plays. She has been quoted as saying that she thinks too many of today's violinists play nervous, and there is certainly none of that in her playing. It's almost like a gentle breeze has blown in and lifted the notes off her strings, and she can be dramatic or warm or lively or deeply introspective all with same untroubled fluency. Even if you've heard these pieces a thousand times before you'll be amazed by these performances. It's almost like hearing Mozart with new ears. More importantly, though, is her genuine affection for this music. You can hear in it in her playing and that's what makes this CD so infectious.

Fischer's credentials are eqally impressive. She started playing the violin at age 3, and by age 13 was playing with the legendary Yehudi Menuhin. She began teaching masterclasses at age 15, and at age 23 received a professorship at the Hochschule fur Musik und Darstellende Kunst Frankfurt am Maim in Frankfurt, Germany. She is also an accomplished pianist who wonders how a violinist can play a violin sonata without learning the piano accompaniment too. Which all leads me to wonder if this is going to be another phenom who burns herself out before she ever sees their thirtieth birthday.

Somehow I don't think so. First of all, she is no phenom. She is young, yes, but I rarely hear of anyone talk of her as being a "young" violinist. Despite her age she is already a polished and mature musician, not only in her playing but in her decision-making as well. All of her choices seem to be for challenging, quality projects, and maybe some of the credit should go to people like Christoph Eschenbach and Lorin Maazel who have reportedly taken her under their wing, or others like Yakov Kreizburg who challenged her to write her own cadenzas for the Mozart Concertos.

To me, staying challenged is the antidote to flaming out. Taking on unchallenging projects that are far below your abilities, or more likley, being content to reach a certain level and advance no farther is a sure sign of burnout in my book. It's too bad so many young talents never reach their full potential, but I hear the music business is a rough way to make a living.

Be that as it may, Julia Fischer shows no sign of following that path. In fact, she seems careful to go in the opposite direction and that is a very good sign. Along with her 2006 Mozart CD and her 2006 Tchaikovsky CD, she has also teamed up with Daniel Mueller-Schott and Jonathan Gilad, two very talented and promising newcomers, on a 2006 release of the Mendelssohn Piano Trios Nos. 1 and 2. Clearly, her interest is in working with only the best musicians who can take her to the next level.

So that's this year's CDOTY. You probably won't find it in your local Barnes and Noble, so unless you have a great record store like the Bay Area's "The Musical Offering", you'll have to get it online. And while you're placing your order why not pick up Fischer's 2005 Mozart Concerto release and Anne-Sophie Mutter's Mozart Sonata's as well. You'll have spent a few bucks but you'll have probably the best Mozart Violin recordings currently out there.

Tags: julia, fischer, mozart, concerto