We asked Hilary Hahn, John Adams, André Rieu and others to pick the music that moves them. Listen to their choices.

In the past, we’ve asked some of our favorite artists to choose the five minutes or so they would play to make their friends fall in love with classical music, the piano, opera, the cello, Mozart and 21st-century composers.

Now we want to convince those curious friends to love the sweet, songful violin.

Andrew Norman, composer

This solo violin piece by Reena Esmail really blew me away when I first heard it. Like much of her work, it inhabits an intensely lyrical space informed by both Indian and Western classical musics. In Vijay Gupta’s gripping performance, I hear sounds, colors and expressions simultaneously familiar and fresh, intimate and epic, grounded and aloft.♣

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