Hilary Hahn Returns

A conductor of vision and distinction, Marin Alsop represents a powerful and inspiring voice. Convinced that music has the power to change lives, she is internationally recognized for her innovative approach to programming and audience development, deep commitment to education, and advocacy for music’s importance in the world.

The 2019–20 season marked Alsop’s first as Chief Conductor of the ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra, which she leads at Vienna’s Konzerthaus and Musikverein, and on recordings, broadcasts, and tours. As Chief Conductor and Curator of Chicago’s Ravinia Festival, she also curates and conducts the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s upcoming summer residencies, formalizing her long relationship with Ravinia, where she made her debut with the orchestra in 2002. Appointed in 2020 as the first Music Director of the National Orchestral Institute + Festival (NOI+F), a program of the University of Maryland’s Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center, she will lead a newly formed conductor academy and conduct multiple concerts each June with the NOI+F Philharmonic.

In collaboration with YouTube and Google Arts & Culture, Alsop is spearheading the “Global Ode to Joy” (GOTJ), a crowd-sourced video project to celebrate Beethoven’s 250th anniversary. Together with Germany’s official Beethoven anniversary campaign and the leading arts organizations of six continents, Alsop invites the global community to share the call for tolerance, unity and joy of the composer’s Ninth Symphony in videos tagged #GlobalOdeToJoy. The project culminates in December 2020, the month of Beethoven’s birth, with a grand video finale: a GOTJ highlight reel, set to a performance of the “Ode to Joy” anchored by the ORF Vienna Radio Symphony, the international Stay-at-Home Choir and Alsop herself.

In 2021, Alsop becomes Music Director Laureate and OrchKids Founder at the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. This concludes her outstanding 14-year tenure as Music Director, which has seen her lead the orchestra on its first European tour in 13 years, on multiple award-winning recordings and in more than two dozen world premieres, besides founding OrchKids, its successful music education program for the city’s most disadvantaged youth. In 2019, after seven years as Music Director, Alsop became Conductor of Honour of Brazil’s São Paulo Symphony Orchestra (OSESP), where she continues conducting major projects each season.

Alsop has longstanding relationships with the London Philharmonic and London Symphony orchestras, and regularly guest conducts such major international ensembles as the Cleveland Orchestra, Gewandhausorchester Leipzig, Filarmonica della Scala, Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, and the Budapest Festival and Royal Concertgebouw orchestras. In 2019–20 she returned to the Philadelphia Orchestra, Danish National Symphony and Orchestre de Paris, whose season she opened in September 2020.

Recognized with multiple Gramophone Awards, Alsop’s extensive discography includes recordings for Decca, Harmonia Mundi and Sony Classical, and acclaimed Naxos cycles of Brahms with the London Philharmonic, Dvořák with the Baltimore Symphony, and Prokofiev with the São Paulo Symphony. Committed to new music, she was Music Director of California’s Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music for 25 years.

The first and only conductor to receive a MacArthur Fellowship, Alsop has also been honored with the World Economic Forum’s Crystal Award, and made history as the first female conductor of the BBC’s Last Night of the Proms. Amongst many other awards and academic positions, she serves as 2020 Artist-in-Residence at Vienna’s University of Music and Performing Arts, is Director of Graduate Conducting at the Johns Hopkins University’s Peabody Institute and holds Honorary Doctorates from Yale University and the Juilliard School. To promote and nurture the careers of her fellow female conductors, in 2002 she founded the Taki Concordia Conducting Fellowship, which was re-named in her honor as the Taki Alsop Conducting Fellowship in 2020.

Three-time Grammy Award-winning violinist Hilary Hahn is renowned for her virtuosity, expansive interpretations, and creative programming. Her dynamic approach to music-making and her commitment to sharing her musical experiences with a broad global community have made her a fan favorite. Hahn’s sixteen feature recordings have received every critical prize in the international press and have met with equal popular success. Her seventeenth album was a retrospective collection that also contains new live material and art from her fans, in keeping with a decades-long tradition of collecting fan art at concerts.

Hahn’s distinct stylistic choices honor the traditional violin literature while delving into the unexpected. In recent seasons, in recital tours across the United States, Europe, and Japan, she premiered six new partitas for solo violin by composer Antón García Abril. The works were Hahn’s first commissioning project for solo violin and her first commission of a set of works from a single composer. García Abril was also one of the composers for “In 27 Pieces: the Hilary Hahn Encores,” Hahn’s multi-year commissioning project to revitalize the duo encore genre.

As part of residencies at the Vienna Konzerthaus, Seattle Symphony, the National Orchestra of Lyon, and the Philadelphia Orchestra, Hahn piloted free—and sometimes surprise—concerts for parents with their babies, as well as a knitting circle, a community dance workshop, a yoga class, and art students. She will continue to create these community-oriented concerts, encouraging music lovers to combine live performance with their interests outside the concert hall and providing opportunities for parents to enjoy live music with their infants.

Hahn is an avid writer, having posted journal entries for two decades on her website, hilaryhahn.com, and published articles in mainstream media. On her YouTube channel, youtube.com/hilaryhahnvideos, she interviews colleagues about their experiences in music. Her violin case comments on life as a traveling companion, on Twitter and Instagram at @violincase.