Nashville Symphony w/Hilary Hahn

8 p.m. Oct. 22-23

Jackson Hall, TPAC

For ticket info, call 255-ARTS

The Nashville Symphony’s fall calendar offers some ear-snagging events. Along with the ensemble’s own programming, some exciting young newcomers are appearing as soloists: Tzimon Barto and Ignat Solzhenitsyn have already been guests of the Symphony, and next month, pianist Jon Nakamatsu, winner of a recent Van Cliburn competition, will undertake Sergei Rachmaninoff’s preternaturally virtuosic Piano Concerto No. 3. This weekend, the Symphony showcases 19-year-old violinist Hilary Hahn playing Mozart’s Violin Concerto No. 4. All these young musicians are drawing enthusiastic praise around the world. They give classical music lovers reason to look forward to our tradition’s second thousand years.

Though all of those mentioned above are fine musicians, only Hilary Hahn began as a prodigy, entering the Curtis Institute when she was 10. Her achievements so far truly are prodigious. Her photos call to mind a very young Judy Garland, and one critic has called her an ingenue. If so, she is an ingenue with lots of solidly grounded chutzpah. Her first CD, containing only unaccompanied violin works by J.S. Bach, appeared in 1997, just as the violinist was making her New York recital debut at Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall.

Playing these intricate polyphonic compositions often generates knee-knocking anxiety. Hahn played them well enough that the disc won France’s most distinguished recording prize, the 1998 Diapason d’Or for “Young Talent”; in America, it was a bestseller for weeks on the Billboard classical charts.

Her newly released second CD couples the Beethoven Violin Concerto (played by Itzhak Perlman in our Symphony’s season opener) with the brilliant and smart Serenade by Leonard Bernstein. (The critic Steve Schwartz calls this “Bernstein’s Stravinsky piece.”) The new CD is already appearing as a classical bestseller on international record charts. That span—from Bach to Bernstein—suggests this young musician’s versatility. She has played Brahms and Shostakovich; she recently played with the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra the world premiere of a newly commissioned violin concerto by Nashvillian Edgar Meyer. This range of repertory, for someone her age, is as noteworthy as her tasteful prowess.

She is to play this weekend the Mozart Violin Concerto No. 4, whose lucid crystalline melodies are very different from Bach’s sinewy embroidery and Beethoven’s strenuous passion. Hilary Hahn’s cool intrepidity deserves our eyes and ears.

For the Symphony on its own, this performance is also something special: Naxos Records will record the orchestra as it plays three pieces by the American composer Howard Hanson (1896-1981) for a CD to be released next spring. (Naxos, a Hong Kong-based company that offers quite high-quality recordings at remarkably low cost, moved its American distribution center from Pennsylvania to Franklin, Tenn., last year.)

One of Naxos’ many projects is to record reputable American composers often overlooked by mainline companies. The scarcity of such recordings, combined with Naxos’ high quality and low cost, make these CDs attractive both to collectors and to institutional libraries trying to gather and maintain comprehensive archives. The proof of any CD is in the hearing, of course, but this is perhaps the Symphony’s best chance so far to do a CD that people will actually listen to. The Symphony has done several CDs, but none of them have really registered on the national radar—nor have they brought the kind of attention that the Symphony no doubt desires. The orchestra’s 1997 CD, for instance, which coupled David Amram’s uninspired Kokopelli with yet one more version of Dvorak’s New World Symphony, went out of print almost at once.

Howard Hanson, a prolific composer for more than five decades, is not altogether unrecorded. Seattle Symphony music director Gerard Schwartz has recently issued on the Delos label much of Hanson’s orchestral music and some of his vocal compositions. There are a few other recordings as well, but Hanson is very little known except among a special musical community. He is perhaps better known as the man who in 1924, at 28, became the director of the Eastman School of Music; over the ensuing four decades, he turned the school into one of the finest conservatories in the Americas.

But he was also at mid-century a well-known and respected conductor, as well as a composer in a wide range of forms. Of Scandinavian ancestry, he was an unabashed neo-Romantic who named as his chief influences Jan Sibelius and Edvard Grieg; he cited as his master of orchestral technique Ottorino Respighi, with whom he studied in Rome. He has substantial entries in prestigious musical dictionaries and encyclopedias, including the New Grove Dictionary, but nearly all of these entries emphasize his importance as conductor and educator rather than as composer.

Though he certainly broke no new musical ground, Hanson does have his advocates. Gerard Schwartz has said: “Neither [did] Brahms [break new ground], or Mozart, for that matter. Does that make Brahms or Mozart less wonderful, because they wrote in forms that were known to us?... We’ve gone through [a] kind of peculiar period in music now, but I believe that those composers who have remained true to themselves...will come to be our important composers.” Hanson, Schwartz argues, is one of those.

Of the three pieces on this weekend’s program, one is named by Hanson himself as perhaps his own favorite—a suite based on his one opera, Merry Mount, which was commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera and premiered there in 1934. Merry Mount itself is based on a Nathaniel Hawthorne short story thematically related to The Scarlet Letter. In a world dominated by the Puritan settlers of Plymouth, a group of sophisticated Cavaliers establish a colony they call Merry Mount near what is now Quincy, Mass. Their pleasure-loving behavior arouses Puritan ire and leads a Puritan preacher to fall obsessively in love with a quite non-Puritan lady. The event has characteristically Hawthornian consequences.

The opera was a smashing, though very brief, success: On opening night, Hanson and the singers got 50 curtain calls—still a Met record. Even so, the opera had only four performances and was not kept in the repertory. The suite based on this melodrama, however, remains one of Hanson’s most often performed compositions.

A date for an evening of Hahn and Hanson makes my ears tingle. The hauntingly lovely young violinist spinning out lucent Mozartian lines, paired with Howard Hanson’s richly passionate and dark harmonies—both violinist and composer deserve to be heard a lot more as we enter our next millennium.