Firmly established and moving into mid-career, famed violinist Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg was already beginning to rethink her priorities and ponder new challenges when an unexpected opportunity sprang up.
After appearing in September with the San Francisco-based New Century Chamber Orchestra, she suddenly found herself the prime candidate to fill its music director vacancy, and the idea immediately appealed to her.
“Although I was open to the idea, it was certainly nothing I was entertaining very seriously,” she said. “I have a very full career and schedule as it is, but the experience was intoxicating.
“And by the time I left, I knew that if it could work out, if it could be, I would make every effort to make it work from my end, and it was almost sort of fated.”
So, Tuesday, just as Salerno-Sonnenberg was about to leave for Denver to begin rehearsals for performances this weekend with the Colorado Symphony, she took her place in San Francisco’s City Hall for the announcement of her three-year appointment.
The conductorless string ensemble, which consists of 17 musicians from around the world, began in 1992. In addition to providing artistic vision and setting programs, she will serve as concertmaster for its four sets of subscription concerts each season.
The violinist, who won the prestigious Avery Fisher Prize in 1999 and was the subject of an Oscar-nominated documentary the following year, will significantly boost the ensemble’s profile, especially when it begins to tour, perhaps as early as 2010.
The timing of the ensemble’s offer could hardly have been better. The 47-year-old violinist is no longer the brash up-and-comer who grabbed the classical world’s attention in 1981 when she won the Naumburg International Violin Competition.
The now-veteran artist regularly appears with top orchestras and has more than 20 recordings and a sizable list of television appearances to her credit, and she acknowledges viewing her career differently.
“I do,” she said from San Francisco, “because I’m older, because I have just that much more experience, because I’m that much more confident and because I have that much more power, as well.
“To be perfectly honest with you, I can make things happen now better than I could 20 years ago, and I will take advantage of that.”
But when she first considered the music directorship, she found plenty of reasons to turn it down, wondering, for example, if she shouldn’t wait a little longer before tackling such a position.
“I could say to you honestly,” she said. “Is it the ideal time? I don’t know exactly. But, as I said, I came here, I played with them, and that was it. Things had to change.”
Salerno-Sonnenberg is not exactly sure how she will fit her new orchestral duties, which begin in 2008-09, into her already overflowing schedule, but she has no doubt that she can do it.
In addition to a performance schedule that includes recitals, orchestra appearances and crossover concerts, she also runs a record label called NSS Music, which is about to release its sixth recording, a jazz album with the the Clarice Assad Trio.
“I don’t know how I do it,” she said. “I have, luckily, an extraordinarily organized mind, and (I’m) also lucky physically. I have an enormous amount of energy. I really honestly wish there were 30 hours in a day because, then, if that were the case, I might actually have some free time.”
Her breakneck pace caught up with her this past summer, when she canceled a series of appearances, including engagements at both the Aspen Music Festival and Bravo Vail Valley Music Festival, where she was to have appeared with the Philadelphia Orchestra.
“I was exhausted,” she said. “I’m constantly, constantly working on some project, and I needed a chunk a time. I needed to just rest for a month.”
So, she took a break at her summer residence in upstate New York.
“Luckily now in my life, I have a beautiful home,” she said. “I think, honestly, if I didn’t have it, I wouldn’t be sane right now. Even if I don’t get to it as much as I would like to, just knowing it is there, it’s just medicine for me.
“So, that’s what I did. I went there, and I swam and I worked on my property. I didn’t play my instrument for three weeks. It was really what I needed.”
Salerno-Sonnenberg returns to the Colorado Symphony to perform a work that she has helped popularize — Dmitri Shostakovich’s Violin Concerto No. 1 (1955). She joins Douglas Boyd, who was just named the orchestra’s principal guest conductor.
Her 1992 recording of the concerto with the London Symphony was reissued in 2005 in advance of the worldwide celebration of the 100th anniversary of the composer’s birth.
“This is my piece,” she said. “I don’t even have any qualms about saying it. That’s just the way it is. It is a piece, since the first moment I heard it when I was teenager, that spoke to me so strongly.”
Already a virtuosa violinist, record producer and musical personality, Salerno-Sonnenberg has another title to add to the list — music director.
Kyle MacMillan: 303-954-1675 or kmacmillan@ .
Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg, violinist
Classical music Boettcher Concert Hall, Denver Performing Arts Complex, 14th and Curtis streets. The internationally known violinist joins guest conductor Douglas Boyd and the Colorado Symphony for Shostakovich’s Violin Concerto No. 1. Also on the program will be “The Rite of Spring” and excerpts from Britten’s “Peter Grimes.” 7:30 p.m. today and Saturday and 2:30 p.m. Sunday. $15-$69.50. 303-623-7876 or
