Author: spencer-peterson

American violinist Hilary Hahn has been a mainstay of the celebrity-soloist circuit since 1991, when she made her major orchestral debut at the age of 15. Over the last decade, Hahn has twice been awarded the Grammy for Best Instrumental Soloist Performance with Orchestra, and in 2010, a piece she commissioned from composer Jennifer Hidgon won the Pulitzer Prize. 

Violin virtuoso Hilary Hahn brings a mixture of classic and contemporary pieces to the Paramount this Wednesday, with Valentina Lisitsa accompanying on piano.

Hahn’s curriculum vitae may be hard to square with things like her latest YouTube post, in which she interviews a betta fish via Skype—“What made you want to be a fish?” she asks. “Is it what you want always wanted to do?”—but whether she’s performing Tchaikovsky or satirizing dull reporters, Hahn is lucid, self-possessed and sincerely playful.

While you wouldn’t call her a crossover artist, Hahn has toured with the angelic Tom Brousseau and the scruffy Josh Ritter, and played on two albums by …And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead. On October 11, Hahn released a more traditional display of her technical virtuosity in the form of Ives: Four Sanatas, which features frequent collaborator Valentina Lisitsa on piano.

The program for Hahn and Lisitsa’s October 19 performance at the Paramount includes Bach’s “Sonata No. 1,” Beethoven’s “Sonata No. 2” and Brahms’ “Sonatensatz in C Minor,” as well as shorts from In 27 Pieces: The Hilary Hahn Encores, a current project that will culminate in the recording of 27 original works Hahn commissioned from contemporary composers. When I spoke with Hahn over the phone—a month after she interviewed the fish, so no (intended) connection there—she advised all in attendance this Wednesday to “come for the experience of simply hearing what happens, because this sort of old-fashioned program doesn’t occur very often.” 

Are all 27 of the commissioned pieces finished for your upcoming encore album?  

I’m currently working on 13 of the pieces to premiere next month, when the tour begins. It’s really exciting to think about presenting these new pieces to audiences so many times. Most of them are completely finished, but on a few I’m still working with the composers on little tweaks, making sure to get things the way they wanted. I’m going to record them at the end of this tour, and I’ll be getting the other 14 ready for next season. So it’s nice to focus on these pieces, which feel like they have unlimited potential for future performance. 

Did you do a lot of cold calling to get in touch with your composers?

Well, I could’ve had someone call for me but I really didn’t want to do that. I wanted to make contact with the composers so that I knew who they were and could established a rapport. I knew that not everyone I called would be able to do the project because these people have a lot of commissions they’re balancing and whatnot. I was actually forbidden to call a few people, because their publishers said they were too busy, and they didn’t even want to give them the chance to accept. But honestly, I didn’t expect so many of them to be open to the project, which is probably the reason the number of composers is so much larger than I initially anticipated. I knew I wanted to commission the pieces, so I could really feel a personal connection to them from start to finish, and find out what pulls them all together.

At the Paramount you’ll be playing Bach, Beethoven and Brahms alongside contemporary works. What drives a classical musician to play from the canon?

With someone like Tchaikovsky or Bach, a lot of people outside of classical music performance get the impression that it’s the same pieces played over and over again. But the thing is, it’s the same notes, but that’s about the only thing that stays the same. Of course, there are traditions of playing, certain things people tend to do that you can choose to go with or not. But you can interpret the speed of a piece, the loudness, the softness. You can interpret the rhythms. Everything in notation is basically relative, so what you choose to do with those relative proportions is up to you. It’s like giving two painters the same object. Of course, another part of it is simply growing up with a work. You know a song and you want to sing along. It’s a bit selfish, the whole artistic side of interpretation.

What is rigorous practice for, aside from obvious things like technique, fitness and memorization?

For me, preparing as much as possible and getting very comfortable with a piece lets ideas come to me in the moment when I’m playing it. You can’t just think of something and do it if you’re not very familiar with a piece. You need a really solid working knowledge of it in order to know what parameters you’re working with. Whether you really can push this tempo at this point or whether you really should put this emphasis on this note. Making decisions in the moment is what makes it really fun to perform. I just try to be as prepared as possible so the performance can be really spontaneous.

The Appalachian narrative has always been molded by outsiders. From the carefree yokels of Li’l Abner to the crumbling coal-mining towns of National Geographic, the popular image of Appalachia has long been one of simplicity and economic decline. 

Four Kentucky miners photographed by Andrew Stern, whose “Appalachian Portfolio” is on view through October at the Bridge/PAI.

Modern Appalachian poverty came under national scrutiny in 1964, when documentary photographer Andrew Stern’s pictures were included in the Senate hearings for Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty program. From 1959 to 1963, Stern traveled to Harlan County, Kentucky, to photograph residents, generating over 900 images that he would eventually use in an Emmy-nominated documentary for PBS. Once his pictures were widely published in the early ’60s, magazines like Life and Look followed up with sensational features on poverty in rural Kentucky, and their characterization of the region lingers.

But despite the role Andrew Stern’s photographs played in sparking public debate, they aren’t pictures of poor, benighted hill folk. As University of Kentucky Archivist Kate Black writes, “his body of Appalachian work does not contain a single photograph of a soiled child pressed against a dirty window peering forlornly out to a world she can’t dream of inhabiting.” Stern’s “Appalachian Portfolio,” on view through October at The Bridge/PAI, is a rare glimpse of mid-century rural life in America, without the exoticizing skew of an exposé.

What first brought you to Harlan County, Kentucky?

I was working in Washington at Voice of America and I saw an article in the New York Times by a later Pulitzer Prize–winning photographer of the dire situation in Harlan County. So I just decided to go down there. I had a few friends in Washington who were friendly with people in the Kentucky labor movement, so I spent a few weeks in Harlan County shooting a lot of photos of the miners and their families, and when I came back there was great interest in them.

Your website has a short gallery of color photos from a return trip to Kentucky in 2008. Why did you return 48 years later?

I was invited by people in Whitesburg. I didn’t have much time, but I spent a couple of days with some of the people there and we tried to find a few of the locations that I had shot. I did make prints from that trip, but I decided not to show them with the old black and whites because somehow it didn’t work aesthetically. I could’ve shot the return photos in black and white, but I thought that would be sort of pretentious. 

How different were things nearly half a century later?

Well, I was nearly half a century older. Of course, the coal industry is changing very rapidly. Mountaintop strip mining continues, but I wasn’t able to really photograph that because you need a helicopter for that. The most interesting thing I heard from the two people who drove me around was about drug use in the region. I didn’t really have time to do that story, but apparently a lot of people are hooked on Oxycontin, and there’s a thriving drug trade where the older people get a certain amount every month over Medicare and sell what they don’t need. Apparently Diane Sawyer went down and did a kind of weepy story about people who drank so much Mountain Dew that all of their teeth fell out, but I don’t know how true that was.

Is photography an honest medium? How does one draw the line between dignified and exploitative?

Let me put it this way. There are some photographers who have gone back in recent years and taken very dramatic black-and-white pictures, or posed people in a certain way to draw a certain effect. I think what people liked about my pictures, then and now, is that I didn’t go down to say, photograph poverty, and I didn’t go out of my way to make people look particularly poor or haggard.

On my third or fourth time down there I took my wife, and when we arrived in Whitesburg, Life magazine arrived at the same time to do an essay on poverty. So we all had dinner that night, the two of us and the writer and photographer they sent down. We talked about what we were going to shoot the next day, and I said we were going to shoot the one-room schoolhouse. Well, Life was also planning on shooting it, so of course, we flipped for it. We lost, and so the next day Life had to drive 25 miles to reach it, and they brought a Jeep because the roads were terrible. Well, Harry Caudill, the author of Night Comes to the Cumberlands, invited us all to dinner that night. My wife and I showed up first, but eventually the team from Life stumbled in, complaining about their really harrowing day on the muddy roads. And Caudill said, “I hope you gentleman were successful in your search for poverty.”

“A magic trick is like a little story,” said Steven Klein.

In Make Believe, a 2010 documentary film produced by Klein and directed by Charlottesville native J. Clay Tweel, magic tricks tell an expansive story, one that the New York Times described as having “all the drama of a high-stakes sporting event.” The film follows six teenage magicians from Japan, South Africa and across the U.S. as they compete to be crowned Teen World Champion by Master Magician Lance Burton at the World Magic Seminar in Las Vegas.

Executive produced by the team behind 2007’s The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters, Make Believe was Tweel’s directorial debut, and the first feature-length film by Firefly, the production company that Klein founded in 1996. The friends had been talking for years about documenting magicians, when Klein, a former teen magician himself, walked into a magic shop and eyed a group of shy, awkward teenage boys who turned into gregarious showmen as soon as they got their hands on a deck of cards. Klein stepped out of the store, called his executive producer, and said, “I think I found the hook. I think it’s kids.”

Make Believe came out on top of its own underdog story when it became the feature documentary winner at the 2010 Los Angeles Film Festival. These days, Tweel and Klein are shopping around the idea of a fictional remake of Make Believe, but in the meantime, their coming-of-age documentary shows again in town on October 8, the first screening locally since last year’s Virginia Film Festival.

Magic tricks translate well to the big screen. Are young magicians the same way?
Tweel: As with any documentary subject, you have to earn their trust a little bit. Some of these kids were worried that we were going to show the world how their tricks were done and betray the art form, and we definitely had to set their minds at ease. They all have this love of performing, so even though they might be introverted off-stage, they would eventually open up and really give us some genuine insights.

What is it about magic that draws in awkward kids?
Tweel: Magic is this art that you can practice a lot by yourself, and it catches on with people who are already book smart and introspective problem solvers. So say you’re 12 years old and you don’t know how to interact with people. Magic can eventually serve as kind of a conduit to help you ease into conversation. You practice in your room for hours on end, but eventually you have to go out and interact with real people in order to perform the tricks, because you have to show them to people who’ve never seen them before in order to call yourself a magician. So that is where the rubber hits the road, whether you can cut it or not as a magician, and learn to communicate with an audience.

Klein: A magic trick gives you a blueprint for communicating with somebody. If you read a magic trick in a book it gives you a script for exactly what to say, but that script is based on the personality of the magician who created it. So these 12-year-old magicians, a lot of them sound like 40- or 50-year-old men, because they’re literally reciting words written by these stage personalities.

What surprised you most about getting to know teenage magicians from all over the world?
Klein: I was surprised by the degree to which the energy of teenage outsiders is similar in Japan or Brazil or South Africa or L.A. That archetype is really consistent in its energy.

Do you know how all the tricks in Make Believe work?
Tweel: Me being the layman with no magic experience, I think there might be one or two that I’m not 100 percent sure on, but I spent enough time backstage to get an idea of how most tricks are done. Steven probably knows how everything works.

Klein: Well, sure, as in how the physics of the trick works. Similarly, I know how to play baseball, but that doesn’t make the Red Sox any less impressive. I know how most of these things are done, but I would have to practice them for three years to do it at the level of any of the kids in the film. Knowing doesn’t take away from the magic of it.