They're short and snappy, sometimes sentimental, and they're played at the end of a recital program or after the performance of a concerto. In some cases, unless we're told — or can make a good guess — we don't know the title. These, of course, are encores.

Hilary Hahn, the brilliant young American violinist, has turned this around. It occurred to her some years ago that encores tend to be drawn almost exclusively from the distant past and that we need an update on "Traumerei" and "Flight of the Bumblebee."

So Hahn commissioned short pieces (five minutes or less) for violin and piano from 26 composers. To bring it to 27, she held a contest and received 400 entries. She and the pianist Cory Smythe recorded them in 2012 and 2013 as a two-disc set titled "In 27 Pieces: The Hilary Hahn Encores" and gradually added them to her recital programs. Her performance with Smythe at the Ordway Center Wednesday night — part of the Schubert Club's International Artist Series — included two of these new encores, works by David Lang and Lera Auerbach.

Part of the interest in this project, besides the sheer enterprise that Hahn displayed in putting it together, is hearing how unique each of the pieces is. To listen to the recording is to hear 27 different voices. Truly, there is no mainstream in music anymore, as there was — or so we're led to believe — in Mozart's time.

Lang's "Light Moving" is a deftly written exercise in the early Minimalist style of Steve Reich and Philip Glass. (At one point, short on cash, Reich and Glass ran a furniture-moving company called Chelsea Light Moving.) The Russian-born Auerbach's expressive "Speak, Memory," which draws its title from the novelist Vladimir Nabokov's autobiography, is almost the opposite of Lang's piece: dark, brooding and slow-moving.

Besides these, Hahn's challenging program included works by Cage, Bach, Debussy and Schumann. To all these, with Smythe's sensitive collaboration, Hahn brought impressive technical command and often penetrating insight. Her Bach, the Partita No. 3 in E Major for Unaccompanied Violin, which closed the first half, was lucid, well paced and musically probing with strong dynamic contrasts and, in the dance movements, an unfailing rhythmic sense.

Hahn's compact, silvery tone, restrained vibrato and patrician sensibility enlivened both the Bach and Debussy's Sonata in C minor, where the incantatory flavor of the final page of the first movement took on bold colors. True, some violinists bring more thrust and impetuosity to a work like Schumann's Sonata No. 1 in A minor, which closed the program. But Hahn's sweeter, more subtle approach offered considerably more charm.

Hahn and Smythe played just one encore, another number from the set of 27, Mark-Anthony Turnage's witty "Hilary's Hoedown." And, just for the record, the seemingly endless line of mostly quite young Hilary fans waiting after the concert for her to sign one of her CDs stretched to the back of the lobby, circled into the theater and then made a hairpin turn back into the lobby. Barry Kempton, Schubert Club's executive director, said the only soloist who attracts as many autograph seekers is Joshua Bell, who, as it happens, will perform in this series next season.

Michael Anthony is a Minneapolis writer.