hilary hahn..violinist

Beauty is in the eye/ear of the listener. She is a fine fiddler and one of the better up and coming stars. However;there are others in her league including Midori,Vengerov , Mutter,Chang, Shaham, Bell and others. Check the NY Philharmonic and the other major orchestras sites concerts of young great performers. I have seen all of the above in the last yearand she falls in the middle (in my opinion) She was very good, but some of the others may be better. Happy listening! Hahn has some well produced recordings out there but live I preferred others.

I studied violin for a long time and other than practicing occasionally I am pretty much relegated to listining to my tubes! Hence audiogon.

To each his own. I'd take Hahn over Bell any day. He's florid and affected, where she is straightforward and direct. Both characterizations are gross oversimplifications, by the way, but that gives you some idea of what makes them distinct--and distinctive. If you're into Romantic warhorses, she may not be your cup of tea.

Personally, I like her Bach, her Beethoven, and her Stravinsky (which may be the definitive version, by default). And I think she has at least one recording out on 5.1 SACD.

When Heifitz's widow first heard Maxim Vengerov play, she gave him Heifitz's bow.

She sums up my feelings.

I had the chance to meet her when she played with the Cincinnati symphoney a few years ago. I also had her sign one of her cd's that is nice she is very good and we will see how her sound matures as she gets more experence.

I was impressed by all the praise, so I bought her SACD (which won a prize) of the Brahms concerto. The way this multichannel disc was mastered is so terrible that I am not sure that I can give a fair evaluation. (She is recorded equally in Left and Right Channels, as if the recording were stereo, and is missing from the center). I bought another Hahn SACD, the Bach double concertos, and this one is mastered better. However the playing also let me down a bit. I have these Bach concertos on a CD that I keep in my car which I copied, and I don't even know who is playing, but I like it better.

She is obviously good, but her playing just does not impact me the way some other performers do. For comparison, I dredged up an old Decca CD of the Tchaikovsky concerto played by a young (in 1982) Korean woman, Kyung Wha Chung, and to my ear she is/was superior. Tops in my opinion was David Oistrach, particularly for the Tchaikovsky. My old Angel LP is just about worn out. Itzhak Perlman, before his fame and fortune set in, was great.

But she is young. We will see where she goes.