San Francisco Classical Voice

As for the great Chaconne that ends the Partita, there can be no denying that Sunday's performance was a staggering technical achievement. Hahn is the only violinist I've ever seen who is really just as comfortable playing a chord up-bow as down-bow. She played the whole opening statement of the Chaconne's theme "as it comes," half the chords "down" and half "up." Only the violinists reading this will quite understand how odd that is. There are places in Bach where you don't have any choice (the opening movement of the C-major solo sonata is one, which is one reason it doesn't get played quite so often), but in the Chaconne you can "retake," lifting the bow after a chord and starting again down-bow. Hahn didn't; she didn't have to. (She did do it at the end of the D-major middle section, where the theme comes back, presumably to make a grand effect; I think it was the only place in the whole piece where her bow left the string.) Then there were the flawless "downward-broken" chords. (Sometimes the theme is on the lowest string and the harmony in a chord above it, and one way to make both speak is to start from the top note of the chord and land on the lowest one. Terrific in theory, very difficult to do in practice without sounding silly. Hahn can, because the whole action is perfectly clean and over in a flash.) And the fine dynamic control over vast spans — particularly vast at her tempos, it must be said; and the eerie pianissimos that had us all leaning forward to catch the music; and —

Well, why go on? The mechanics aren't the point; even the effects aren't the point. The piece is the point, and at the end of that Chaconne I was flabbergasted anew by Hahn's skill . . . and totally unmoved. I think it was the first Chaconne I've ever heard that didn't have even the slightest hint of human frailty about it. Maybe that was the problem?

Hahn and pianist Natalie Zhu are apparently recording a disc of Mozart sonatas for Deutsche Grammophon, as part of Hahn's recent contract with the label. If only DG had signed Zhu to do Mozart violin sonatas and asked her to pick a violinist, rather than the other way round! Zhu's piano playing was unfailingly graceful and nimble and stylish. I wouldn't say that Hahn is the last violinist in the world who ought to record Mozart, but I do think that Mozart is the last thing in the world that she ought to record right now.

Sunday's program began and ended with Mozart sonatas — the little G-major K. 301 to start, and the bigger A-major K. 526 to finish. The sweet little G-major had all the life sucked out of it by Hahn's relentlessly glued-to-the-string bowing (I don't think there was a lifted upbeat in the whole piece). The A-major came off better — partly because Hahn's bow occasionally came off the string — but I remain mystified that she wants to play this music at all. She has no particular fun with it, even when she has the chance. I know a dozen violinists who would take those paired notes under slurs at the beginning of the first movement and play with them. I know a dozen violinists who would leap at the syncopations in the "Presto" and make them zing. And I know many more than a dozen violinists who know what "Andante" means, and wouldn't have taken that middle movement at that somnolent tempo. When the page-turner reached over to turn back at the exposition repeat you could almost hear the collective mental sigh from the audience.

Of course, that might have been because the concert was supposed to have been long over. The conventional Zellerbach loudspeaker announcement before this 7 p.m. concert began said that the concert was two hours long; but they weren't reckoning on Hahn's tempos in the Bach. As it happens, the first half ended well after eight; and when the first piece on the second half ended, a bit after nine, an obliging Zellerbach staffer followed Hahn and Zhu onstage with a large bouquet, not realizing that they still had a hefty piece to go and were just going out to play it. In the end there was the Mozart and then a pair of encores — nearer three hours than two.

The odd piece out on the program — the one mistaken for the end of the concert — was Ernst Bloch's 1920 Sonata No. 1, a wild tripartite rhaposdy, full of ferocious attacks, mysterious textures, and exotic harmonies. Here Hahn was a disciplined Fury, fierce and deadly accurate — when she was not posing, as at the start of the second movement, as an unusually corporeal ghost. (Even muted, she sticks to that dense, present sound.) Zhu handled a monstrous piano part brilliantly, and with a breathtaking range of colors. It was glorious.

So was the second of Hahn's encores, the "Russian Maiden's Song" from Stravinsky's Mavra, sultry and occasionally ornery. The first, a Bach "Siciliano," was just wanly pretty. The moral would seem to be that Hahn ought to play more 20th-century music. Please?