A young violinist with clout

NEW YORK - Music feels like an intimate conversation when Augustin Hadelich is at work.

When the up-and-coming violinist has a Strad under his chin and a bow in his hand, musical thoughts flow effortlessly, in a mellifluous tone with a sophisticated, varied vocabulary that's not above hearty chortles. And Hadelich will need all of that to pull off his ambitious Philadelphia recital debut on Sunday with sonatas by Poulenc, Brahms, Schnittke, and Debussy, plus contemplative Takemitsu and flamboyant Sarasate.

If he's eager to please, he's more eager for people to listen. "I may ask people to not applaud in the first half," he said the other day. "I've done that recently. When you come on to play a three-minute piece, you don't want applause, applause, applause."

A young violinist who turns down applause? That's original - and only a superficial manifestation of what happens when a major talent grows up outside the mainstream. Not only did Hadelich grow up on a farm in Tuscany, but his only teacher for years was his cellist father, who brought home sheet music for difficult modern works other violinists would flee.

He also spent crucial teenage years in even greater isolation, recovering from a fire that, at 15, nearly killed him and left him scarred.

Now 27, Hadelich is a Juilliard graduate, spent three summers playing chamber music at the Marlboro Festival, and won numerous prizes at the 2006 International Violin Competition of Indianapolis. He has four recordings, a good but not overwhelming schedule of 80 engagements a year, and the clout to depart from the norm, whether asking audiences to hold applause during an unorthodox program, or trying out the acclaimed but not well-known Thomas Adès Violin Concerto (Concentric Paths) before a reputedly conservative crowd at the Chautauqua Institution in New York state.

"It's difficult for everybody and it'll be a lot of work. But the concerto will have an important place in the repertoire, and it's important that I learn it as soon as I can," he says.

His sense of urgency about time arose repeatedly in an hour-long conversation in his spartan Upper West Side apartment. He once spent six months learning a modern solo work only to decide that he didn't really like it. "I wish I could get that six months back," he said.

One of the few outward manifestations of a life beyond music is the corner dominated by Rubik's Cubes and other puzzles that are objects of his obsessions. "They're way too addictive, and time-consuming," he says.

The biggest time loss was the accident, which kept him away from the violin for more than a year, and in intensive recovery for two. Until then, Hadelich had been a fairly active wunderkind violinist, sometimes in the company of his fellow prodigy and almost exact contemporary, Julia Fischer. His German parents cultivated music within the family - Hadelich's two brothers play cello and piano - and sought out musicians who were on Tuscan vacations to work with the young violinist.

One was Norbert Brainin of the Amadeus Quartet; another was Uto Ughi, Italy's premier violinist. Both left their marks, Brainin with the intellectual detail of a great chamber musician, Ughi with an Italianate lyricism that now comes so naturally to Hadelich he almost seems not to know it's there.

The 1999 fire cut all that short. Few details have been published because not much is known, and, like many trauma victims, Hadelich himself remembers nothing. He was found alone outside on the family's farm, burned over 60 percent of his body - his face, upper body, and right arm. He was airlifted to burn specialists in Germany, who saved his life and salvaged his badly burned right thumb, crucial to violin playing.

Did he fear he would never play again? "That thought went through my head. Definitely. And for several months, that was in question. But when I did try to play, I played a little bit of piano. And when I tried to play violin again, it hadn't really changed a lot," he recalled. "I just had to get better."

One could speculate that what the accident might have left was a greater appreciation for his gifts, if not emotional depths. "Things that you take for granted, you appreciate them for a while," he said, "until you take them for granted again."

If there's a bright side, it's that his convalescence kept him out of more typical teenage troubles. "A lot of things can go wrong in that phase of life," he says. "Who knows what would've happened?"

Even so, Hadelich admits he was a bit of a handful when he first arrived in the United States, where his primary Juilliard teacher, Joel Smirnoff, shrewdly evaluated what he was doing right and corrected matters that were holding him back. He can't say enough for his three summers at Marlboro, where spending months at a time on a chamber music piece - including obscure ones, such as the Schoenberg String Quartet No. 3 - broadened his perspectives immeasurably on composers he'd known for years.

However, delivering the goods musically can be secondary to the psychological stamina necessary for the competitive classical music world, even after winning competitions as important as the Indianapolis. "It takes a while to put yourself together again," Hadelich said of his post-accident psyche. "But by the time things got rolling careerwise, I was in a pretty good place. And one thing that's pretty nice about the competition, they don't throw 100 concerts in your face. It's more of a gradual start. A few tours. You learn to travel well and juggle a lot of pieces that you're preparing."

Chautauqua has become a major career base - he's been there every summer since 2003 - and enjoyed significant breakthroughs such as filling in for Nikolaj Znaider with the New York Philharmonic's 2010 Vail season; music director Alan Gilbert reportedly is a serious Hadelich fan. Ditto the Toronto Symphony's Peter Oundjian. He now plays the famous "Kiesewetter" Strad, on loan from the Stradivari Society (its previous steward, Philippe Quint, once forgot it in a cab).

Whether or not there are strong reality-based reasons for Hadelich's sense of urgency, that quality is markedly absent from his playing. Though he moves easily from the standard romantic concertos to a period-instrument style with Haydn violin concertos, he most effectively invites the ear with his unguarded emotionalism. Many musicians have it when teenagers - Lang Lang, for example - but lose it in their 20s.

Hadelich's longtime manager, Michal Schmidt, has a different ear for the violinist's special quality: "Lack of aggression in his playing."

Could it be that simple? Well, how many other musicians offer that kind of respite from an ultra-aggressive world?