Since making his auspicious — and unexpected — New York Philharmonic debut in 2010, when he stepped in to replace an ailing soloist in the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto, Augustin Hadelich has cemented his status as one of the world’s most celebrated and in-demand violinists. His numerous honors include a Grammy Award and Lincoln Center’s Martin E. Segal Award for emerging artists — the latter on the Philharmonic’s nomination. This season, there are two opportunities to hear Hadelich perform: when he joins guest conductor Dima Slobodeniouk for the Barber Violin Concerto, November 20–22, and when he appears in a solo recital on the Artist Spotlight series, January 5.
“I’ve performed with the NY Phil many times, and I feel very close to the Orchestra and its musicians,” says Hadelich, who has already performed with the Philharmonic in 20 concerts. “Also, I first collaborated with Dima in 2022, and it struck me immediately what a serious and thoughtful musician he is, so I can’t wait to play the Barber with him.”
Composed in 1939 and ’40 and revised in 1948, the Barber Violin Concerto is a defining work of the American classical music repertoire. Hadelich, who was born in Italy to German parents, first performed the concerto in 2010, six years after he moved from Italy to the United States to study at The Juilliard School, where he earned an artist diploma.
“The Barber is a work that I didn’t really know before I moved to the United States,” Hadelich says. “It simply wasn’t played much in Europe in the 1980s and ’90s. When I moved to America, though, I fell in love with it. Funnily enough,” he adds, “even though for years I was a German violinist touring in America, performing mostly German repertoire, in recent years I’ve often been considered an American violinist when I travel to Europe, and I’ve performed the Barber there quite a lot.”
The Pennsylvania-born Barber described his Violin Concerto as “lyric and rather intimate in character”; similarly, Hadelich finds it “lush and beautiful.” In the context of its time, the work stands out for its melodic qualities. “It’s a neoromantic work,” Hadelich says, “and it makes no apologies for that. I love that it never veers into kitsch. The emotions of this piece are heartfelt but not overly sentimental.”
One of the most striking examples of the concerto’s neoromantic nature comes in the second movement. “The incredible oboe solo at the start of the slow movement was surely inspired by the Brahms Violin Concerto,” Hadelich says, referring to a famous passage in the 1878 work. The Barber’s third and final movement is a four-minute, perpetual-motion, virtuosic showpiece. Hadelich notes it is “much more modernist and maybe influenced a bit by both Copland and barnyard fiddle music,” and that it is also “much more challenging than the first two movements.” Still, he adds, “it provides a wonderful and much-needed contrast to the lyrical first and second movements.”
Six weeks after these performances of the Barber concerto, Hadelich — who last appeared with the Philharmonic in 2024, in Vail, and 2019, in New York — will return to David Geffen Hall for an intimate recital featuring works for unaccompanied violin. “The program’s first half is lighthearted and extroverted,” Hadelich explains, “with two playful Telemann fantasies, two blues-inspired works by Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson, Ysaÿe’s evocative Fifth Sonata, and two Paganini caprices.” The recital concludes with J.S. Bach’s Partita No. 2, whose final movement — the Chaconne — Hadelich says“might be the greatest piece ever written for the violin.” The Chaconne, he adds,“creates moments of anguish and sorrow and leads us to moments of introspection and bliss. It feels like a journey through life itself.
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