For violinist Hilary Hahn, returning to Chicago feels just like ‘old home week’

For celebrated violinist Hilary Hahn, coming to Symphony Center is like old home week.

“It’s like returning home in a way,” said Hahn, who served as the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s inaugural artist-in-residence during 2021-24. “You look forward to it. You know what you are returning to. You kind of anticipate it in a way that’s really pleasant. And you can also hit the ground running. That’s how I feel going back to Chicago.” 

For season-opening concerts Sept. 17-19, conducted by Petr Popelka, Hahn will perform Felix Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto in E Minor, Op. 64, one of the most beloved works in the form. Also on the program are Robert Schumann’s Overture to Manfred, incidental music inspired by an 1817 poem by Lord Byron, and Antonín Dvořák’s less frequently heard Symphony No. 5.

These concerts will be Hahn’s first with the CSO since December 2023. In July 2024, she announced on her Facebook page the first of what would be a series of hiatuses because of a double-pinched nerve and herniated spinal disc. She resumed performing early this year and appeared in a Symphony Center Presents recital May 24 with pianist Tom Poster. 

Now 46, Hahn has received an array of honors, including three Grammy Awards and a 2024 Gramophone Recording of the Year for her album of Eugène Ysaÿe’s violin sonatas, and she regularly appears on the world’s premier concert stages. After a short European tour with the Vienna Philharmonic in early September, she performs with the CSO and then travels to the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra for its season-opening gala Sept. 24 with guest conductor Giancarlo Guerrero.

After serving as a visiting artist at New York’s prestigious Juilliard School, Hahn became a member of the faculty in spring 2025. Because the institution is “very performer-friendly,” she is able to teach students full time, working lessons around her busy concert schedule. Students can opt to study solely with her or take part in a shared studio, in which they rotate among several teachers during a semester. She enjoys helping the young musicians build a solid technical foundation while passing along some tricks of the trade. “I love the teaching,” she said. “It’s really nice to be on that side of it, because I had great mentors and teachers myself. I like trying to be useful in that way.”

Few classical artists are more active on social media than Hahn, who sees it as way to connect with her fans and interest others in classical music. Probably most popular is her groundbreaking Instagram series, 100 Days of Practice, which gives viewers glimpses into the often-hidden and little-understood world of musical practice. For 100 days at a time, she tapes her daily practice and then chooses one minute from the session to post that best reflects what she has accomplished. Hahn occasionally still posts such videos, but she has largely completed that project, believing that the wealth of posts — some 650 online videos covering 700 days — gives viewers plenty of material from which to draw. 

When she started the video series, she didn’t think there would be much interest. “But then I realized it was actually a very taboo subject that people really needed to see,” she said. “That changed the nature of it for me. I feel like it’s [100 Days of Practice] been around for long enough that it has changed a bit of the conversation around practice, and it’s changed the isolation of practice and gotten people talking about it. So, I really feel the job that I never set out to do has been accomplished.”

Hahn also presents a series called Seatbelt Storytime, filmed while sitting in a parked car. It’s a way for her to create what she calls a “more detailed, violin-centered, longer-form video.” In one of the first editions, she talked about her experience working with the New York Ballet and the differences of performing in the orchestra pit vs. onstage. “I asked if people if they like the format, and they did. And I was like, ‘OK, whenever I want to tell a story, it’s Seatbelt Storytime,” she said.

During the COVID-19 shutdown, influencers began to favor the in-car format for their social-media posts and Hahn also adopted it. “It’s a format that I’m very familiar with as a viewer, so it just felt very natural for me to try it out myself,“ she said. ”Also, there’s good sound in the car. You don’t have background noise. No one is interrupting you. You don’t have to set the set the scene or get the lighting right. You just drive to where the lighting looks OK, park and tell your story.”

One of Hahn’s recent Seatbelt Storytime videos relates her experience of performing the world premiere of Barbara Assiginaak’s Niibaashkaa, in which the Canadian indigenous composer was asked to reimagine the first movement of Max Bruch’s Violin Concerto No. 1. The Hamburg State Opera Orchestra debuted the work in January as part of a series of new works in which composers were asked to reinterpret movements from existing classical compositions. The remaining movements are played in their original form, with the idea that the revised section allows the piece to be heard in a fresh way. 

Hahn chose Assiginaak for her contribution to the project, because she had worked with the composer on a new solo work for violin and admired her writing.

In addition to her usual recitals and orchestral concerts this season, Hahn also is performing with South Korean pianist Yekwon Sunwoo, the 2017 gold medal winner at the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition, and baritone Matthias Goerne. Their program will include a new work by Indian-American composer Reena Esmail for baritone and violin, which will receive its world premiere during the trio’s program Oct. 24 at Spivey Hall in Atlanta. They will perform several more times together in October, November and early December.

Then in April 2027, she teams up for two concerts, including one at Carnegie Hall, with cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason and pianist Benjamin Grosvenor for a program that features Beethoven’s inventive Piano Trio in G Major, Op. 1, No. 2. “It’s Sheku and Ben’s project, and I’m honored to be invited into it,” she said. She has not performed with either of them previously, but she admires their playing. “I just was thinking, “Oh, this is going to be so good,” she said. “I think we’re musically really compatible. And it’s been a long time since I played piano trios.”

When Hahn was growing up, she just accepted works in the violin repertoire without giving them much thought. “What I was being taught just seemed like the truth, the one narrative,” she said, “and now I see that there are many narratives, and the narratives kind of weave in and out. This is really interesting to me.”

As her career has progressed, she has seen concertos go in and out of favor. “Then, all of sudden, everyone seems to be playing it, and everyone is asking for it,“ she said. ”And it seems to have become again standard repertoire or what I prefer to call foundational repertoire.” The example of that phenomenon currently is Dvořák’s Violin Concerto in A Minor, Op. 53. After a series of recordings in the 1990s and early 2000s brought the work attention, it faded back into the shadow of the composer’s more famous cello concerto, but Hahn is now getting frequent requests for it and is performing it with the Vienna Philharmonic during its European tour this month.

Meanwhile, 20th-century works that were not played as often because they were considered new, challenging or even a little scary are now seen as established repertoire. “So that’s also a really fascinating process,” Hahn said. As an example, she pointed to Igor Stravinsky’s Violin Concerto (1931), which was rarely played when she was a student. Now that it’s seen as a 20th-century masterwork, it is being played more regularly.

All that said, the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto has consistently remained a favorite since the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra gave the debut in 1845 with concertmaster Ferdinand David, for whom it was written, serving as soloist. “I have a hard time picking favorites,” Hahn said, “but I do love it from a long time ago, because I learned it pretty early when I was a student. And I really like to return to those pieces, because in a way, you remember the whole sequence of events that took you to where you are now. Also, in a way, you always have a chance to take a fresh look at it.”

She describes the concerto as a “beautiful piece” that is “relatively fast-paced in an artistic sense” with a consistent forward momentum and a well-balanced interplay of solo and orchestral passages. “It never lingers too long,” she said. “But it seems to always linger just the right amount on whatever character it’s in at the moment.”