Hilary Hahn

One of the world’s most admired violinists from a very early age, Hilary Hahn long ago demanded—and, more surprisingly, was granted—a certain carte blanche with regard to programming her CDs. Provocative juxtapositions are a speciality: When she issued Beethoven’s Violin Concerto on disc in 1999, she paired it with Bernstein’s piquant Serenade. Two years later, she matched Brahms’s towering edifice of a concerto to Stravinsky’s wiry neoclassical one.

There is considerably less distance between the concertos of Schoenberg and Sibelius than in the aforementioned examples. Each wrote an atmospheric, darkly passionate work that requires a soloist of sublime technique and supreme confidence. Functional harmony aside, the main difference is that Schoenberg’s concerto—lacking the high-flying, singing tunes of the Sibelius—has never attracted a champion capable of truly selling it.

Until now. That Hahn is in perfect technical control comes as no surprise, but what makes this disc so vital is the way she homes in on the melancholy gravity at the core of this music: The concerto was, after all, the first major work Schoenberg completed after abandoning war-torn Europe for Los Angeles in 1936. Esa-Pekka Salonen provides eloquently shaded support, both here and in one of the most sizzling Sibelius performances on record. All told, it’s the first mandatory classical disc of 2008.

—Steve Smith

Hilary Hahn plays at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Drom Apr 12, 2008.