New Hilary CD

There's been much waiting for the new Hilary Hahn CD - and it comes out this next week!!!
Grammy Award-winner Hilary Hahn to Perform at Drom to
Celebrate New Schoenberg/Sibelius Disc
With special guests Josh Ritter, Tom Brosseau and Gabriel Kahane

New York, NY – After her sold-out performance at The Metropolitan Museum of Art on Saturday, April 12th, Grammy Award-winning violinist Hilary Hahn will head downtown to the recently opened club Drom to host a release party for her new album, the Schoenberg and Sibelius concertos on Deutsche Grammophon, with Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Swedish Radio Symphony. To help celebrate the release, Hahn will be joined in performance by a trio of unique singer/songwriters: Josh Ritter, Tom Brosseau and Gabriel Kahane.

Hilary Hahn continues to revel in unanticipated repertoire for her recordings. On the surface, the Violin Concerto of Arnold Schoenberg, finished in the mid-1930s during his exile in America, is not an obvious pairing for Jean Sibelius’ Violin Concerto, written at the start of the 20th century. As Hahn explains it, she knew that this would be many listeners’ first experience of Schoenberg’s probing, virtuosic music. Accordingly, she says, “I wanted to pair the Schoenberg with something that would reflect its dark lyrical side, as well as its playfulness, from an unexpected angle. The Sibelius concerto seemed to me the perfect foil. The Sibelius is often presented as either a highly Romantic work or as very cold, but I think that it carries within it other aspects that don’t always rise to the surface in traditional couplings. I thought that the Schoenberg and the Sibelius, side-by-side, might bring out unexpected nuances in each other.” The album will be released in the US on April 8th.

The new album and double performance in New York on April 12th are the latest in a series of projects stemming from Hahn’s attention to unexpected musical and thematic threads across the traditional boundaries of classical music. In 2004, Hahn was the violin soloist on the Oscar-nominated soundtrack to M. Night Shyamalan’s film The Village; in 2005 and 2006, she appeared as a guest on albums by the band …And You Will Know Us By The Trail of Dead and wrote and performed violin parts on singer-songwriter Tom Brosseau’s record Grand Forks before appearing with him on several of his record release shows. She continues to tour with Josh Ritter this spring, after inaugurating their performance collaboration last summer at the Ravinia, Aspen, Verbier and Eastern Music festivals; next season, they will play a show together in Tokyo.

Gabriel Kahane, Tom Brosseau and Josh Ritter have each found their ways into the indie spotlight with their particular perspectives on and contributions to the contemporary American songbook. Kahane has been trained in the classical and jazz traditions and now, armed with technical virtuosity and an intensely deep gift for writing, he has won over fans and critics with his affiliation of raucous pop culture and deft high-art craft. Of the North Dakota–raised and –inspired Brosseau and his latest album Grand Forks, Time Out London said, “There are some singers, a rare few, whom it’s hard to believe are really from this time, such is the otherworldly pull of their voice... Dakota songman Tom Brosseau is one of these strange birds.” Ritter has quickly caught the attention of anyone interested in the progression of American folk music, having recently released his fourth critically-acclaimed LP. Jon Pareles wrote of him in the New York Times, “Josh Ritter reaches back to folk-rock that was invented before he was born - not just for its sound, but for its ambitions.”

Hilary Hahn will perform excerpts from the Schoenberg/Sibelius album and will join Kahane, Brosseau and Ritter on selections of their original works.