Hilary Hahn - A Portrait (DVD)

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The Artist - Hilary Hahn - violinist:

Hilary Hahn is an acclaimed American violinist who was born in 1979, she started studying the instrument at the age of 4 and after studying at the renowned Curtis Institute of Music she started her phenomenal career which has taken her around the world working with a raft of world class orchestras and performing in all the top concert halls. She has won a Grammy for her recordings of the ...
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Hilary Hahn has pursued an original approach to her highly informative website at www.hilaryhahn.com where she maintains a travel blog giving a fascinating insight into her touring musical life around the world and a further indication of her interest in stretching the limits of her career is her collaboration with various non-classical musicians from the world of rock and country. Anyone who enjoyed M. Night Shyamalan's terribly ... more

Introduction:

Artist profile DVDs can be extremely revealing in helping to provide a deeper perspective into what makes a particular musician "tick" and as a result listening to their recordings or concerts becomes an even more rewarding experience. The Maxim Vengerov DVD portrait - "Living the Dream" which I reviewed recently on Ciao, was a great example of a documentary which gave a real insight into his personality, family background and musical ambitions. So it was with eager anticipation that I picked up "Hilary Hahn - A Portrait".

The Artist - Hilary Hahn - violinist:

Hilary Hahn is an acclaimed American violinist who was born in 1979, she started studying the instrument at the age of 4 and after studying at the renowned Curtis Institute of Music she started her phenomenal career which has taken her around the world working with a raft of world class orchestras and performing in all the top concert halls. She has won a Grammy for her recordings of the violin concerti of Brahms and Stravinsky, along with a host of other awards during her highly productive recording activities. After an initial contract with Sony Classical she is currently contracted to Deutsche Grammophon and her recent unusual album combination of the Schoenberg and Sibelius Violin concerti was the first recording of a piece by gritty 20th century composer Schoenberg to ever hit the top of the classical charts - quite an achievement.

Hilary Hahn has pursued an original approach to her highly informative website at www.hilaryhahn.com where she maintains a travel blog giving a fascinating insight into her touring musical life around the world and a further indication of her interest in stretching the limits of her career is her collaboration with various non-classical musicians from the world of rock and country. Anyone who enjoyed M. Night Shyamalan's terribly scary movie "The Village" (I have to admit I spent most of it hiding behind my sofa...) will have heard her as featured soloist on the Oscar-nominated soundtrack.

So having already tremendously enjoyed several of her recordings and concerts, and been impressed by her obviously strongly formed musical ideas, I was expecting a really interesting documentary which would not only provide more inspiring examples of her truly excellent playing but hopefully also a deeper look into her personal background and musical philosophy. Unfortunately things did not pan out the way I had hoped with this DVD...

The Documentary - and comments:

Basically the form of the documentary covers a concentrated period of Hilary Hahn's touring life.
We start with her about to go onstage at Berlin's famous Philharmonie Hall with the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin to perform the Korngold violin concerto conducted by Kent Nagano, there's a taste of that kind of frisson before a performance but straightaway the main issues with the DVD for a potential buyer become obvious. Looking at the DVD one can see that one of the main extras is a complete performance of the Korngold, so why on earth do we find that during the documentary itself - the Korngold also appears almost in its entirety? OK, the 3 movements are separated with documentary coverage of Hilary Hahn, but in total we hear about 16 minutes of the 26 minute long concerto... that's 16 minutes of totally duplicated material! I could understand if perhaps only a couple of minutes of each movement appeared in the documentary, but so much - no, I'm sorry, this is a big issue I feel for any potential buyer.

It would have been easy to find other material instead which would have made the DVD much better content-wise. But one has to emphasise that it is a fine performance by Hilary and the orchestra and certainly well worth watching and listening to. This is lush and dramatic music, originally written as Hollywood film music.
The documentary moves on to talk about the Korngold with Hilary and it is disappointing and surprising to find her rather ill at ease - she doesn't appear to know the background to Korngold's flight from his native Austria at the start of World War II and doesn't come out with any of the well known details of what film the music was originally written for. Her rather tongue-tied commentary certainly makes me feel rather embarrassed for her and wishing she could just be left to play her violin - which is what she really does so beautifully.

Another segment with Kent Nagano discussing Hahn's performance of the Korngold is so peculiar I just have to pick up on it - he is filmed with the orchestral porters tidying up the Berlin stage behind him, with all the clatter and banging around this involves. Couldn't the producers have found a quieter corner to film? One gets a really rather haphazard impression of their production skills.

Perhaps the weakest and least interesting part of the documentary comes when Hilary Hahn takes the viewer around the Curtis Institute where she studied for 10 years. Whilst naturally one can understand her loyalty and respect for her renowned teacher Jascha Brodsky, her rather anodyne comments such as "Oh, they've painted the walls here and put in a new carpet - we only had a tatty sofa when I was here..." etc don't give a viewer any proper insight into her ideas and life as a musician, it feels like another waste of time on the DVD.

Perhaps the only interesting comment in this section is when the former head of the school Gary Graffmann talks of her audition and says how it was obvious right from the first notes that Hilary Hahn was a major talent. I feel it would have been much more enlightening for the DVD to take a look further back into Hilary's relationship with the violin: Did she choose to start learning it at age 4? Did she come from a musical family? Did she always want to be a musician etc?

However, the most frustrating aspect of the DVD comes when Hilary Hahn performs Bach in a Dresden nightclub called the Yellow Lounge, a venue which occasionally promotes classical music events in a much more informal situation than a concert hall, people can drink and eat while listening to the performance. It is an unusual situation and Hilary starts to play the intellectually and mentally demanding Bach Chaconne from the D minor Suite, it is immediately clear that the audience are at once riveted to her charismatic performance but what happens on the DVD? The narrator starts talking over the music! I was SO annoyed at this I wanted to throw my remote through the screen!

This was a situation where the power of a really fine young musician to appeal to a non-classical audience could be shown in action and the atmosphere has to be ruined by the DVD production. I have to say this was certainly VERY frustrating to the viewer, especially as her performance sounded an original and highly appealing one. If only the repetition of the Korngold had been vastly reduced, we could have heard the whole of the Bach in this unique and challenging venue.

Additionally, Hilary Hahn spoke of the effect that playing Bach had both on herself and on children that she had played for - it was one of the few moments where I felt she was starting to open up about her feelings about music. She then was shown warming up with the Gigue from the D minor Suite, again inexplicably "voiced over" by the narrator, most annoying!

Between these too long extracts from the Korngold, there is footage from Hilary Hahn's visits to the Abbey Road Studios in London to record with the London Symphony Orchestra and conductor Sir Colin Davis, and then a short segment when she performs Paganini's 1st violin concerto in Hong Kong. It is at this point that Hilary seems to become more at ease with the filming and we learn of her approach to recording and practising on the road. It is really an indication of how interesting this documentary COULD have been. Ironically, the most revealing conversation with her in the entire DVD is right at the end when she is packing up after her performance in Berlin, suddenly for the first time, one can see a young woman in her twenties who does actually have a life, interests and opinions outside of music...

DVD extras:

Well, this section covers everything from "exceptional" to "somewhat helpful" in Ciao terms! As already mentioned there is a totally wonderful complete performance of the Korngold Violin Concerto, which I would recommend highly to anyone who doesn't know this work or who admires Hilary Hahn's playing. This is followed by a rather routine but nevertheless enjoyable rendition of Mozart's violin sonata in G major, K.301 with Hilary Hahn's regular accompanist Natalie Zhu as pianist. So far so good, both items are very acceptable extras for any DVD. However it is downhill from here I am afraid!

On the menu we are told that 3 additional sections follow billed as interviews with Hilary Hahn and Natalie Zhu, called: First collaboration at Curtis; Recording Mozart; Selection of the Programmes and finally Partnership of the Instruments. I was looking forward to at last getting some meaningful comments from Hilary Hahn about her music making and approach to violin playing. But this was not to be: each section consisted of little more than a couple of minutes, if even that, of simplistic and rather bland comments from Hilary and also her duo partner Natalie Zhu. To be honest, I was rather gobsmacked! When I thought back to all the great opinions, ideas, anecdotes and so on which Maxim Vengerov came up with in his portrait DVD, this made me feel very short-changed indeed.

Suffice it to say that there are also subtitles available on the DVD extras in German, Spanish, French and Chinese, as well as a photo gallery of Hilary Hahn (nothing that one can't find online) and her duo partner Natalie Zhu.

Final conclusions:

This DVD was a big disappointment to me in the sense that I was looking forward to getting a better insight into one of the finest young female violinists playing on the international circuit today, but that simply didn't materialise. Yes, there is some great playing on this DVD, in particular the Korngold, and also most tantalizingly the spoken over extract from Bach's Chaconne, but it doesn't make up for the frustrating aspects of the DVD as I've discussed in this review. The so called interviews are a total laugh; they aren't interviews at all, just a few short uninteresting sentences if even that. Having the music spoken over is another big negative point in terms of buyer choice and the totally unnecessary duplication of much of the Korngold is a huge marketing mistake which certainly reduces the appeal of this DVD. On a positive note I do have to say that the sound quality which includes Dolby Digital and "dts Digital Surround Sound" is excellent and can't be faulted.

However, I come away not feeling that I've really learned anything about Hilary Hahn as a person, which is a total contrast to my opinions after watching the Maxim Vengerov "Living the Dream" DVD. In Hilary's case it does seem to be that the documentary is really just a glorified glossy PR hand-out from her record company Deutsche Grammophon - though even here I'd expect a little more insight and much better organisation! The excellent Korngold and Bach merits 2 stars. For information about Hilary, the buyer is best off going to her website.

If you want the Korngold violin concert on DVD or are a big fan of Hilary Hahn, watch out for special "used" offers of this on Amazon. Otherwise, rent this or spend your time and money on some of the far better violin and violinist related DVDs around! All in all, a BIG disappointment. 

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