No restraint

Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg, star soloist in Sunday’s big Moscow State Symphony stop at the Wharton Center, is the wrong person to ask.

“I suppose it can be restrained,” she admitted. “I very much doubt it will be for these performances.”

Salerno-Sonnenberg, 53, is touring the U.S. with a live-wire orchestra and conductor she’s never worked with before: the Moscow State Symphony Orchestra, with legendary Pavel Kogan at the podium. Tchaikovsky’s whirling-dervish Fourth Symphony, the music Paul Newman was murdered to in the bizarre 1964 film “What a Way to Go,” is the other big work on the program.

Kogan doesn’t rock the three days’-beard-growth barbarian look of his more famous St.

Petersburg colleague, Valery Gergiev, but he is among the most exciting conductors in the world, let alone Russia.

“It’s not surprising to me that the orchestra and the conductor have a reputation of being intense,” Salerno- Sonnenberg said. “In all the art forms that come from (Russia), we’re talking about deep, deep emotion, and there’s nothing held back.”

The same could be said for her. Salerno- Sonnenberg is known for playing so athletically she used to irritate stiff traditionalists who complained about her enthusiastic “mannerisms.”

But that was long ago. After a splashy debut as a young prodigy, several “Tonight Show” appearances, a mid-career injury and a bout with depression, she is deep into a new phase of artistic growth. Audiences love to watch her sway, dance and groove with the music.

She’s now in her sixth year as music director of San Francisco’s New Century Chamber Orchestra, an innovative outfit that crosses over into other genres and regularly premieres new works, many of them commissioned for her.

“Without a doubt it’s completely changed my life, or added to it,” she said. “I still do what I do, but now I realize I can do much more.”

Her role as first among equals in a chamber orchestra is an effective antidote to the isolation of being a star soloist. The New Century ensemble plays without a conductor, as a string quartet or piano trio would.

“Everybody is responsible,” she said. “There’s no back of the section in this orchestra. It’s a spectacular music experience.”

Salerno-Sonnenberg was born in Rome and came to the United States when she was 8 years old.

Early exposure to Italian opera pushed her to err on the side of passion rather than caution. In 1981, she became the youngest-ever winner in the Naumberg International Violin Competition. She wryly ticked off the stereotypical phases of press coverage she’s gone through since then.

Early in her career, she talked some baseball with a Washington Post reporter as part of a longer, in-depth interview. The next day, she picked up the paper and read the headline, “The Violinist from Left Field.”

“It went into the press kit and journalists ran with that,” she said. But she’s grateful for the story, which led to her Johnny Carson appearances and a segment on “60 Minutes.” Since then, she’s made better copy than most classical musicians.

“The next phase was, ‘What’s Johnny like?’“ she said. “Then cutting off your finger.”

In 1994, Salerno-Sonnenberg cut off part of her left pinkie while chopping onions. She re-fingered her repertoire and kept performing, but sank into a depression and attempted suicide. (The episode is chronicled in an Academy Award-winning film by Paola De Florio, “Speaking in Strings.”) At her comeback performance at Carnegie Hall in 1995, she played Shostakovich’s searing Violin Concerto No. 1. If she could grab everyone on Earth by the throat and urge them to listen to one piece of music, she said, that would be it.

She first heard it as a teenager, while cleaning the house. She stopped, sat down on the floor and listened until it was over.

“I heard that ominous beginning and I was hooked,” she said.

Her teacher was Juilliard’s Dorothy DeLay, a legendary figure who taught generations of great violinists, including Itzhak Perman.

DeLay told her it was a bad idea, but she learned it anyway, on her own time.

“I had to,” she said. “That’s my piece.” Since then, she’s juggled labors of love like the Shostakovich with just plain labor, as most classical careers require, but hides the difference well from listeners.

“There are certain pieces in which there’s so many ways of seeing it and playing it and feeling,” she said. “Others, it just really is what it is.”

Her newest CD, “From A to Z,” is definitely in the former category. It’s stacked with four intriguing new works dedicated to her, including Michael Daugherty’s “Fallingwater,” inspired by the Frank Lloyd Wright house, and a turbulent piece by Clarice Assad, “Dreamscapes.”

Sunday’s concert might give Lansing music lovers more than a touch of déjà vu. We just heard the Bruch concerto in September, played by the Lansing Symphony with soloist Evgeny Kutik.

As warhorses go, the Bruch is pretty supple. It broke the mold of romantic concertos by putting its heart into the second movement, a slow and songful river of emotion with several shifts in mood.

“It’s very passionate and also very tender and one has to hold the (melodic) line for the whole movement,” she said.

Still, the double dip is a disappointment. Charitable people might call it a coincidence. The LSO season was etched in stone over a year ago, and nobody expects Kogan to pick up the red phone in Moscow and call Lansing before he decides which pieces his orchestra will prepare for an American tour.

No, scratch that — he should have called us. Far from a coincidence, the double dip of Bruch is symptomatic of the play-it-safe, baked-chicken-and-bread-pudding repertoire that still holds sway in the orchestral world.

Most music lovers in Lansing would have implored Kogan to let Nadja be Nadja. She’s premiering new works left and right in San Francisco and is still one of the world’s biggest champions of the Shostakovich concerto, arguably the greatest of the 20th century and an experience few listeners forget.

In the 1990s, she recalled, she had to beg her management to let her play the Shostakovich. “It was like pulling teeth,” she said. “Nobody wanted it. I had to agree to do 1,000 interviews for every city to prep the audience, prep the community.” She fought the same battle to play another 20th century masterpiece, Samuel Barber’s violin concerto.

“When I started playing, they were not standard repertoire and it’s nice to see that they are now,” she said.

Not standard, it seems, in Middle America. This might have been our only chance to hear Salerno-Sonnenberg perform Shostakovich, Barber, Assad, Daugherty or any of her other labors of love in Lansing.

Yes, the Bruch is a masterpiece — we just heard it, thanks — and it’s a safe bet Salerno- Sonnenberg won’t phone it in. It’s not her nature. But the day will come when people won’t even want to look at baked chicken anymore, no matter how juicy it is.

Moscow State Symphony Orchestra

Pavel Kogan, conductor Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg, violin 7 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 9 $15-72 (800) WHARTON, whartoncenter.com