A prodigious talent that defies labels

Hilary Hahn's calendar is crowded, and she intends to keep it that way.

Three or four times a week during the season, the 24-year-old violinist appears with major orchestras or in important recital series in America and Europe. At a time when significant musicians have to create their own record labels to promote their work, Hahn stepped easily from Sony Classical, where she won a Grammy in 2002, to Deutsche Grammophon, where she is being promoted as part of the new generation of classical musicians who will capture the public imagination and dominate the music business the way their predecessors, also at Deutsche Grammophon, did. She wastes no time; when she travels, she keeps a diary of her adventures and posts it on her website. Her wispy glamour photos mask the steadiness of purpose that has brought her to where she is.

Hahn played with the Boston Symphony Orchestra last season, and Saturday she makes her local recital debut in Jordan Hall, presented by the Bank of America Celebrity Series. She is an extraordinary instrumentalist with strong musical ideas that are all her own, fabulous intonation, and a beautiful, clear, clean, modern tone -- "nothing schmaltzy about it," says her Grammy Award-winning producer, Thomas Frost, who made records with such legendary figures as Vladimir Horowitz and Rudolf Serkin.

Last week, Hahn was playing her current recital program of Bach, Mozart, and Faure in Ireland, France, Austria, and Italy; this week she plays it in California, Washington, and Kansas before arriving in Boston.

Recently she spoke on the telephone from Nancy, France, where she had performed earlier in the evening with her collaborative pianist Natalie Zhu. They have worked together since they met as teenagers at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia.

"If I want to spring a surprise, she can tell it; we know we are going to vary something without working it out in rehearsal," Hahn says. "We're like friends who spend a lot of time together -- talking alike, finishing each other's sentences."

Hahn has been playing the violin for 20 years; her first was a 1/32-size instrument. She reached regulation size when she was 11, by which time she had played her first full solo recital. That year she played with an orchestra for the first time; her debut appearance with a major orchestra, in Baltimore, where the Virginia-born violinist grew up, came a year later.

Many prodigious violinists enter the funnel of the public eye when they're very young; not all of them come out the other end -- or emerge in adulthood with top-tier international performing careers.

Audiences feel a fascination with teenage violinists, especially female ones, and every couple of years there is a new crop vying for attention. The phenomenon caught fire in the 1970s with the arrival of Dylana Jenson and Anne-Sophie Mutter; much has been expected from figures such as Midori, Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg, Sarah Chang, Viktoria Mullova, Leila Josefowicz, and Anne Akiko Meyers. In America, Hahn pretty much has the field to herself in her age group, but in Europe there are other brilliant young women reaching for the brass ring: Janine Jansen, Baiba Skrida, Julia Fischer, Lisa Batiashvili, Tamsin Little.

All of the older violinists in this group remain active, but not on the scale their admirers predicted -- not that every male prodigy has come through unscathed. Jenson settled into marriage, although she still plays and teaches. Like Pamela Frank (whose parents never permitted her exposure as a prodigy), Salerno-Sonnenberg lost momentum when she was sidetracked by an injury. Midori paid a high price for early celebrity, and, like Chang, has made erratic artistic progress. Among female violinists concertizing at the top level in middle age, Mutter and Kyung-Wha Chung remain alone; among the seniors there are Miriam Fried and, still going strong at 80-plus, Ida Haendel.

When the subject of prodigies entered the conversation, Hahn flared up; it's clearly a hot-button topic for her.

"That word 'prodigy' has such a derogatory implication," she complains. "It is used to describe people who are forced to play a lot of concerts very early, people whose audience comes because of their youth, people who are exploited. None of the above really applied to me."

Hahn explains her own situation. "Most kids are very seriously interested in something -- friends, math, shopping, sports. For me it happened to be music and the violin. I had the chance to pursue it without having it get in the way of my life."

Hahn says her career began because her teachers felt it was important for her to perform everything she learned, "and I learned a lot, pretty fast." At the beginning she played in student recitals or retirement communities. A lot of people, she says, were looking out for her, and they advised her to finish school before going out on the road extensively, so that's what she did. "But it is not a bad thing for a young musician to get out there and play, and I don't think it's fair to condemn someone for doing that."

The violinist certainly does get out there and play. Summers she does try to keep for herself and for extra-musical projects. Next summer, for example, she will take an intensive Japanese-language course (as she has taken courses in French and German in the past); she likes to be able to communicate directly with her fans.

Hahn has also been careful to keep her options open and to develop a life in music beyond high-profile concerto engagements. She has always played chamber music and recitals; for someone her age, she has played a fair amount of new music. Last year, she performed on her first film soundtrack, music James Newton Howard composed for M. Night Shyamalan's "The Village."

Producer Frost believes that Hahn will make it over the long haul.

"She is thoroughly determined to be as good as she can be, and she doesn't let other things interfere with her violin playing," he says. "She is very secure about herself, and very organized. All of her projects are properly prepared, and that can be quite complicated with her schedule. She studies her music very thoroughly and brings her own interpretation to it. She has also done things that other young people coming along, like the pianist Lang Lang, haven't bothered to, like spending time at the Marlboro Music Festival in Vermont, learning to play chamber music. When she's 40 she will be an even more mature artist than she is now."

Hahn understands that some violinists drop out, sometimes intentionally, sometimes not. "It's a tiring profession, and people get injured; children arrive and you can't be away from home as much," she says. "Not every time will be your heyday, but it's important to stick it out because it will come again."

She never took a break during the turbulent teenage years. She says she was involved in music to the point that she couldn't stop without making a big deal out of it, and she didn't want to do that. "Of course everyone has those moments of frustration now and then, when you say, 'I wish I could play well already -- or just stop.' But it's too much trouble to stop just for a moment of frustration. It is when you keep going that you make the most progress."