Hilary Hahn, Robert deMaine, and Natalie Zhu

Her PCMS concert did have one newsworthy aspect: It provided local audiences with a rare chance to hear her work with a chamber ensemble.

Her collaborators for the occasion were pianist Natalie Zhu and cellist Robert deMaine. Zhu toured with Hilary Hahn for several years, and they’re a perfect match. They’ve both developed formidable technique, but their technical mastery always serves the all-important virtue Hahn displayed when she was still a kid with braces: They use it to create poetic, dramatic, precisely shaded performances based on a clear artistic vision.

I heard that artistic sensibility the first time I heard Hilary Hahn play a few bars of the Mendelssohn violin concerto at a Curtis workshop for conductors, and it was the primary reason she impressed me. In all the arts, a small number of whiz kids become technically proficient at an early age. You even encounter teenage writers who can turn out saleable prose. Artistic vision usually develops later, sometimes never.

I had never heard Robert deMaine, and I felt his contribution to the first half of the program was a poor showcase for his abilities. Beethoven’s second cello sonata was one of the first sonatas ever created for the cello and piano. Beethoven was still exploring the possibilities and searching for the right balance between the subdued voice of the cello and the big voice of the piano. DeMaine had to contend with a situation in which (a) Beethoven gave most of the best bits to his partner and (b) his partner happened to be one of the most nuanced, disciplined pianists currently appearing on the world’s concert stages.

A dialogue between equals

For her contribution to the first half, Hilary Hahn chose a piece that repaid all the artistry and technical mastery she and Natalie Zhu gave it — the violin sonata Debussy wrote in the last months of his final illness. Debussy gave the piece a title that implies the piano part is an accompaniment, but the piece is actually a dialogue between two equal instruments. It opens poignantly and finishes with a technical display that spans the whole range of the violin, from the lowest note to the highest. Performed by this pair, it felt like a tennis match in which your attention keeps bobbing between two spectacular players.

The third item on the program was an epic — Tchaikovsky’s 55-minute trio for violin, cello, and piano. Tchaikovsky wrote the trio to satisfy a request from a patron, and he crammed it with all the passion, melody, and emotional variety he put into his symphonies. DeMaine set the tone — and established his position in the ensemble — with the first soulful notes from his cello. Tchaikovsky’s overflowing creativity gave all three performers a series of big moments, starting with an elegiac opening and finishing with a set of variations that includes effects like a waltz and the touching sound of a music box.

Hilary Hahn was the primary reason the concert was sold out, but she never let her star position affect the balance of the three instruments. A casual listener would never have guessed the young woman in the violin chair was an international headliner. When the violin and the cello blended in the last section, they created a perfectly balanced sound neither instrument can create alone. Hilary Hahn has developed and matured, but her appeal still rests on the virtue she seems to have possessed from the moment she picked up a violin: She’s an artist.