Hilary Hahn: Born original

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‘I’ve got this project,’ says Hilary Hahn, tucking her feet up comfortably beneath her on the leather couch. ’Postcards on the Internet. Do you know it?’

Umm. Well. There’s a way of choosing and sending an internet postcard by email. Is that what she means?

‘No, no.’ She’s not impatient - she must be used to the slowness of the older generation. ‘I’ve got a website. You go to www.sonyclassical.com - if you click on my name you can get to my website through Sony. I’ve been writing this series - over 30 postcards. I send them by email. I have a digital camera with me, so I take pictures and send them electronically and I write about stuff I’m doing on the road.’

Is that so surprising? She may be the first young soloist on the world circuit to dream it up, but it’s the kind of thing you could expect from a fiendishly intelligent 19 year old working out ways of keeping in touch while trotting the globe.

An interest in words and writing is less of a given in the field of musical performance, but to Hahn that’s also perfectly normal. She pens sleeve notes for her own CDs. ‘Brilliant and mercurial,’ she writes of the Bernstein Serenade, ‘it strikes me with the freewheeling force of a sophisticated street argument.’

Wow. Where did that come from?

‘Alfred Brendel writes a lot, too,’ she says in self-defence.

You can’t catch her out. Everything that Hilary Hahn does is, to her, is the most natural thing in the world. And that’s how it comes across.