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Violinist Hilary Hahn was well worth the wait

Intimate finale with spare backing of a chamber orchestra

Channing Gray
cgray@providencejournal.com
Violinist and three-time Grammy winner Hilary Hahn often performs with the Kingston Chamber Music Festival artistic director, pianist Natalie Zhu. [Courtesy of Kingston Chamber Music Festival]

SOUTH KINGSTOWN, R.I. —  She finally made it. And the wait was well worth it.

Divine violinist Hilary Hahn, who has been bedazzling audiences since her teens, helped cap off the final program of this summer’s Kingston Chamber Music Festival Sunday afternoon with some sizzling Bach.

Hahn, 38, had planned to appear at the festival a few years ago but bailed at the last moment. The three-time Grammy winner often performs with the festival’s artistic director, pianist Natalie Zhu. So there’s a connection that this summer paid off.

And no questions fans of the festival, now in its 30th season, were overjoyed to hear Hahn team with Canadian violinist Juliette Kang for Bach’s ravishing double violin concerto, with a melting slow movement to die for.

Hahn then returned to the stage of URI’s Fine Arts Center, backed by a crack chamber orchestra, for more Bach, this time the composer’s sunny E Major Concerto, which bubbled over with joy and warmth.

And for a special treat, she offered some solo Bach as an encore, Bach being one of her specialties.

Normally, the festival sticks pretty much to string quartets and the like. But to wind up this anniversary season, it booked a small string orchestra made up of a lot of members of the Philadelphia Orchestra, players who are as good as it gets.

Just a handful of them backed up Hahn in the two Bach selections, which made for a wonderful sense of intimacy and the kind of hand-in-glove interplay that rarely happens when partnering with an 80-piece orchestra. This was not a soloist and orchestra locked in battle but more a musical love affair.

Conductor Kensho Watanabe, who led the players without a baton and moved like a ballet dancer, had a lot to do with the afternoon’s success, pointing up the details and finding the delicacy in the music.

True, the opening Mozart Rondo, with pianist Reiko Uchida, was a tad precious, barely rising above a mezzo-piano. But the Bach, while finely etched, had plenty of kick.

Perhaps the high point of the afternoon, though, was Watanabe’s take on Tchaikovsky’s glorious Serenade for Strings, perhaps the best thing the composer ever penned.

It is, of course, normally performed by string sections large enough to pack Yankee Stadium, and sold to audiences by conductors pushing its sweep and lushness.

But Watanabe, associate conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra, had just 18 players to work with, and he opted instead to sell this heart-rending score with a sense of gentleness and space. There was this wonderful sense of give-and-take in the lilting second-movement waltz, and a heart stripped bare in the touching Elegie.

I’ll admit I was a skeptic when I saw the Tchaikovsky on the program and just a few string players. But I walked away feeling what Watanabe and his modest minions pulled off was perhaps the best performance of the Tchaikovsky I’ve ever heard.