On track: Virtuoso scales heights

Hilary Hahn's latest CD comes to us with one German critic claiming "it doesn't get any better, more beautiful, more truthful than this". Praise indeed, although we are not talking Bach or Mozart.

Some eyebrows might even shoot heavenwards at the realisation that it is concertos by Paganini and Spohr that the American violinist is giving us.

Hahn played Paganini's D major Concerto when she toured New Zealand a few years back. It clocks in at 37 minutes, with a 20-minute first movement that sounds as if it has been patched together from Rossini and Zigeuner airs.

Praise be to Hahn, however, that somehow this straggling monster of a concerto hangs together. Such is the unflinching persuasiveness of her playing, whether in the first movement's gypsy flourishes or the spiccato gaiety of the Rondo.

Conductor Eiji Oue doesn't have too much to worry about in the way of interpretative challenges but he marshals the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra sympathetically around the soloist.

Producer Christian Leins creates a rich surround of sound in Stockholm's Berwaldhallen; orchestral lines are clearly differentiated, and steady yourself for the occasional tumultuous chord.

It's a brave violinist who takes on the music of Louis Spohr, although Hahn is a devotee.

Claiming that his Eighth Concerto "only sounds quaint when you don't put the drama in it," she concludes: "When you let it sing, it's modern beyond its time".

She stresses the act of singing in a short essay for the CD booklet, The Violin as Voice, although, if the truth be known, Spohr's work is a little short on good tunes.

The slow movement, having accounted for its Adagio theme within a few minutes, suddenly erupts into uptempo melodies that seem more in keeping with the operetta house.

Predictably, Hahn's committed virtuosity carries the piece through to its closing bars. In its Finale, after a pretty lame orchestral fugato, she gives a breath-stopping demonstration of just what those old-style fiddlemeisters were all about.

* Paganini and Spohr, Violin Concertos (Deutsche Grammophon 4776232)