World class violinist gives Milwaukee two thumbs up!

By OnMilwaukee Staff Writers Published May 23, 2001 at 7:53 AM

Hilary Hahn, the wonderful violinist who was in Milwaukee two weeks ago, has a website in which she sends "postcards" from the road. Her entry on Milwaukee is now posted, and it says some very nice things about our city!

Hilary amazed the MSO audience with her wonderful playing and beautiful composure. She's a well-traveled young lady, so it's interesting to read about our home city from her point of view. Here's what she had to say about Milwaukee. Some of her photos are included here, but see them all at www.hilaryhahn.com.

May 13, 2001 - Milwaukee, WI
Dear Readers,
Happy Mother's Day, 2001!

This week I did something different. Since I was going to be in Milwaukee for a full week, I rented an apartment instead of the usual hotel room. Opera singers, who tend to stay in a single town longer than instrumentalists, do that a lot -- both to save money, and to feel less like they're camping out. So this week I've been enjoying a furnished corner apartment with full kitchen, 2 baths, a big living room, and bay windows facing in 2 different directions. It's been great: like home, but with bigger windows, different decor, and a panoramic view of huge Lake Michigan. Every few hours, as the weather has altered the color of the sky and the direction of the wind, the hue of the water has changed, from pale silver to a deep indigo and everything in between. And since the windows face eastward, every morning I've seen the sun rise over the lake -- which was beautiful, though I have to admit that the bright light streaming in through my bedroom window at 5:30am sometimes woke me earlier than I intended.

I got out for a couple of nice walks this week. One was on a rainy late-afternoon, when I visited Milwaukee's Riverwalk (a peaceful, traffic-free pedestrian area beside the Milwaukee River). Then this morning, my last day in Milwaukee, I took a Sunday-morning stroll through a park by the shore of Lake Michigan. Other people were out and about, too -- fishermen, rollerbladers, and several joggers, one of whom was literally running circles around her boyfriend.

In the course of my week here, I also had a series of 3 performances with the Milwaukee Symphony and its German-born music director, Andreas Delfs. The piece we were playing was the Elgar concerto, one of the most distinctive pieces in the violin repertoire. It isn't played that often in the States -- this orchestra hadn't played it since 1984. The Elgar is traditionally played with very large orchestral forces (56 or 57 string players alone, not to mention full brass, wind and percussion sections), and it is often difficult for the orchestral sections to hold back enough for the single solo violin to be heard clearly. Sometimes that challenge just can't be overcome -- but here everyone pulled through, and the concerts went very well. Tonight's concert felt particularly solid -- maybe it was all the families in the audience, out for a special Mother's Day event, silently cheering us on. After the concerts, the signings were fun, with people forming perfect waiting lines, everybody polite to everybody else, and lots of kids stopping by to say hi.