Hilary Hahn, a three-time Grammy winner, plays Mozart’s Turkish concerto with the London Philharmonic and Karina Canellakis, before Brahms’s First Symphony.
Hilary Hahn, a three-time Grammy winner, plays Mozart with the London Philharmonic Orchestra at the Royal Festival Hall on the South Bank on Wednesday 27 January 2027. Karina Canellakis conducts.
Born in Lexington, Virginia, in 1979 and raised near Baltimore, Hahn began the violin a month before her fourth birthday. She entered the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia at ten and studied there for seven years with Jascha Brodsky, a pupil of Eugène Ysaÿe.
She made her major orchestral debut with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra at 12, and her international debut in 1994 with Iván Fischer and the Budapest Festival Orchestra. She has since released 16 albums on Deutsche Grammophon and Sony, and Jennifer Higdon and Edgar Meyer have written concertos for her.
His Violin Concerto No. 5, K219, nicknamed the Turkish, is a teenage work, and Mozart wrote its solo part to play himself. Canellakis, the orchestra’s Principal Guest Conductor, frames it with Robert Schumann’s overture to Julius Caesar and Brahms’s First Symphony.
Schumann was Brahms’s mentor, so the evening opens and closes on the two men. The orchestra has recorded the Brahms on its own label.