“Making my first album gave me a chance to think again about the sounds I love and the kind of music I want to make in the future,” Himari tells Apple Music Classical. The Japanese violinist, born in 2011, speaks with the authority of someone four times her age, thanks to the musical maturity she has gained since playing her first notes as a three-year-old. The album Debut is much more than a record of teenage talent, such is the depth of Himari’s artistry and her readiness to take risks in the hunt for heartfelt emotions. “I’m especially drawn to playing in which the violin seems to sing like a human voice,” she notes. “I love experimenting with how one note connects to another, where to use portamento [to slide between notes], and how much portamento is needed to make a phrase sing naturally without becoming too much.” Himari’s debut album opens with a live recording of Henryk Wieniawski’s Violin Concerto No. 1. The Polish violinist composer wrote the piece in 1852 when he was 17 and gave its first performance with the Leipzig Gewandhausorchester the following year. Its opening movement, littered with tricky double stops, vertiginous leaps and fiendishly fast fingerwork, ranks among the most difficult in the repertoire. Beyond technical wizardry and pyrotechnics, the concerto also contains enchanting melodies of a kind that Chopin might have composed. “Wieniawski’s music brings together so many of the things I love about the violin,” says Himari. “There’s brilliant virtuosity, of course, but there are also beautiful singing melodies and moments that can feel almost operatic. I think the violin can express something very close to the human voice. When I play this concerto, I try not to focus only on the virtuosity; I’m always looking for the ‘voice’ behind the notes.” Himari was 11 when she began studying the work with Ida Kavafian, her teacher at Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute of Music, and chose to perform it three years later with the Berlin Philharmonic. Having listened to the orchestra’s recordings since childhood, she was deeply moved to make music with its players. “The first thing that struck me was the depth and richness of their sound,” she recalls. “Every sound from the orchestra seemed to have depth and character. It was very exciting to listen to how my violin sound could exist within that orchestral sound and to feel the musical dialogue between us.” Debut includes transcriptions of piano pieces by Chopin and Leopold Godowsky crafted by the legendary violinists Jascha Heifetz and Nathan Milstein. The passionate Mazurka from Sibelius’ Five Pieces for Violin and Piano maintains the album’s connection to the music of Poland. “Recording these pieces with Chelsea Wang was very special for me,” says Himari. “She’s a pianist I trust very much, and we really focused on listening and responding to each other. One of my favourite pieces is Heifetz’s transcription of Chopin’s Nocturne. I feel very comfortable and happy when I play it. When Chopin’s melody is sung by the violin, I feel that it has a different kind of breathing and phrasing from the original version. I hope listeners might also discover another way of hearing Chopin through the sound of the violin. Each of the other pieces has its own character and colour, and I hope that together they show how many different expressions and voices the violin can have.” The album’s closing number, Wieniawski’s romantic Fantasia on Themes from “Faust”, contains a multitude of violin voices and emotional states. Himari’s interpretation projects a singing quality suited well to music based on tunes from Gounod’s opera. “This piece has such an operatic character that sometimes, when I play it, I feel more as if I’m singing than playing the violin,” she observes. “Even within all its virtuosity and brilliance, I hope listeners can hear something of the emotion, tenderness and melancholy of the human voice.” What has Himari learned from making Debut? “For this album, I experienced two very different kinds of recording,” she replies. “The Wieniawski concerto is a live recording, so it captures exactly what happened on stage that day. The pieces with piano were recorded in a studio, where sometimes we performed the same passage or piece several times. I think one of the most important things I learned was how to keep the music fresh each time. Even when you play something again and again in a recording session, you cannot lose the original feeling of the phrase, the colours of the sound or the natural flow of the music. I learned to try to approach every take as if I were playing it for the first time.”