Hilary Hahn returns to Pittsburgh to open the Y Music Society season Tuesday having been dubbed "America's Best Young Classical Musician" this summer by Time magazine.

Pittsburgh audiences have known the violinist's extraordinary qualities for many years. Now 21, she made her Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra debut when she was 14 and was featured soloist for the reopening of Heinz Hall and the start of the orchestra's centennial season when she was 15.

Beyond Hahn's musical appeal, the Baltimore native is an extremely personable public figure. She's keen to meet members of her audiences after concerts, was delightful on "Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood" and writes "Hilary's Journal" on her Sony Classical Web site.

"When I was little, I used to like to meet musicians whom I'd seen play with the Baltimore Symphony," she says. "I had friends in the orchestra who would introduce me to those people. Since not everyone can get backstage, and it's interesting what classical musicians' lives are like, I started the journal."

Hahn says the great thing about the life she's built for herself is that "I'm able to play music all I want. Because of music, I'm able be able to travel around and see different countries and cities. I get to meet a lot of people and work with great musicians. I can't imagine anything better than that for me."

This summer, she took an intensive course in German. "I feel bad forcing them to speak my language," she says. "I'm the visitor." And she has a big German TV interview coming, for which she's preparing.

But watching German TV can be disconcerting. "`Married with Children' is very bizarre in German," she says, admitting she's not sufficiently fluent in idioms to get all the jokes. It's also strange hearing Mary Tyler Moore say "Jawohl! Herr Grant."

"In almost any country you can get around without speaking the language," she says. "But speaking the local language helps me be part of what's going on."

For all Hahn's musical success and public celebrity, including a recent photo feature in Vogue with three other top violinists, she remains charming and unpretentious. Her journal entries this summer included her falls while trying to water ski. She mentioned it because she thought it was funny, but admits she is aware that she's a role model for aspiring younger musicians who look to her for inspiration.

Hahn's fall recital tour, including her second appearance on the Y series, reunites her with pianist Natalie Zhu, who just graduated from the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, where she studied with Claude Frank and Gary Graffman. They began playing together when Hahn was 13. "We're really good friends, and it's nice to have a roommate on the road now and then."

The Y Music program includes Johann Sebastian Bach's Sonata No. 1 for unaccompanied violin. Her debut recording (at 17) was solo Bach, and declared she was no mere virtuoso. Its technical demands are tremendous, but more importantly it requires depth of musicianship.

Hahn's next CD will be of Johannes Brahms' Violin Concerto, and her program features the composer's Second Violin Sonata, the least often performed of the three. "It was first Brahms sonata I ever learned, when I was 12 or 13. I have a lot of memories of little concerts I did back then for seniors."

Unfortunately, her project to record Brahms' sonatas with pianist Garrick Ohlsson has been canceled. Her fifth CD will couple Felix Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto with the first concerto of Dmitri Shostakovich, in collaboration with the Oslo Philharmonic under Marek Janowski.

Whenever Hahn gets together with a new pianist, she likes to read through the sonatas of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. For her recital, she's picked one Mozart wrote when he first arrived in Vienna in 1781. In April 1999, she played his "Turkish" Concerto with the Pittsburgh Symphony.

The concert will close with a new piece to her repertoire, Camille Saint-Saens' Violin Sonata No. 1.

"At first, I didn't know what to make of it, opening with one arpeggio after another. I tend to think of French music as more lyrical, but this is very dramatic and substantial. I came to really like it after playing it a few times and figuring out what was drawing it to me."

Mark Kanny can be reached at (412) 320-7877 or mkanny@tribweb.com.

Hilary Hahn

With Natalie Zhu on piano, presented by the Y Music Society.

8 p.m. Tuesday.

$37.50.

Katz Performing Arts Center, Jewish Community Center, Squirrel Hill.

(412) 392-4900.