J oseph Szigeti, Jacques Thibaud, George Enescu, Fritz Kreisler, Mathieu Crickboom and Manuel Quiroga: six violinists who as individuals spanned the gamut of musical language – from Enescu’s Romanian folk leanings and Quiroga’s Galician inflections, to Thibaud’s French sensuousness and sparkle – and who stand collectively as the dedicatees of Ysaÿe’s Bach-inspired Six Solo Violin Sonatas op.27. In this set, dating roughly from July 1923, each sonata is lovingly fashioned to its dedicatee’s personal vernacular, with their many in-jokes including (in no.2) Thibaud’s ‘obsession’ with Bach’s Solo Partita in E major. Essentially, there’s enough ‘golden age’ violinist DNA buried in this score’s pages to keep a musicolinguistic treasure hunter going for hours.
Not that Hilary Hahn – a direct descendant of Ysaÿe in violinistic terms, having been taught by his pupil Jascha Brodsky – had limitless hours when preparing her recording of it. In fact, it was pure serendipity that she was able to ‘squeak it in’, as she puts it, for the set’s centenary year at all. The idea came to her in October 2022, when, while touring to Ysaÿe’s former home capital of Brussels, she gratefully mused on her lineage, and then on the sonatas, which were already on her bucket list of recording projects. Musings turned into an online search for their composition date – ‘We tend to think of them as relatively contemporary, but it suddenly occurred to me that they may be a little bit older’ – and the discovery of their approaching milestone. Then came the rub, because a back-calculation revealed that any recording to coincide with the date would need to be in the can by Christmas. However, then came more serendipity, because not only did her touring schedule turn out to leave precisely the right number of pre- Christmas days to get the recording done, but also both her local Boston WGBH Studios and her usual coproducer, Antonio Oliart, were available.