‘The Voice’ by proxy

Cellist Bion Tsang sings with a cello at Saturday’s Lansing Symphony concert

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Austin-based cellist Bion Tsang, guest soloist for Saturday’s Lansing Symphony concert, coaches youth football, loves to roughhouse with his three young kids and has a great laugh. He sounds like a guy most people can relate to.

Yes and no.

On the cello, Tsang, 47, blends seam less technical mastery with a singing sound that seems to come from the center of the Earth. He’s had the gift for a while. He made his debut with the New York Philharmonic and conductor Zubin Mehta at 11.

“I don’t know how I did it,” Tsang said in a phone interview. “The music just kind of flowed from within.”

Tsang’s oneness with his cello was already obvious, but it wasn’t the only way his life could have gone.

“Had I been born a foot taller and 80 pounds heavier, I probably would have played football,” he said.

His parents barred him from the sport, but he snuck in a few games in college anyway. After breaking his left index finger and tearing a ligament in his right thumb, he hung up the cleats and bowed to the inevitable.

“I didn’t want to pin myself down to any one thing, but playing with the Philharmonic when I was 11 gave me insight into what was possible,” he said.

Tsang doesn’t jingle his prizes at you, but he has a trunkful of them. He’s one of six American cellists to get a medal at the International Tchaikovsky Competition since it started in 1958.

On Saturday, he’ll play one of his earliest musical loves, Tchaikovsky’s “Variations on a Rococo Theme.” As a boy, Tsang rode home each night from Juilliard School’s pre-college program to the family home in Poughkeepsie. His father would put on a CD of master cellist Mstislav Rostropovich playing the same piece.

Tsang rocked to sleep in the back of the car while the Russian master coaxed a dry, Haydn-ish seed of a theme into a gorgeous garden of variations.

“Each variation challenges the cellist in a different way,” Tsang said. “Tchaikovsky is one of the greatest masters of melody, so the piece really shows of the singing quality of the cello.”

Tsang loves his instrument’s kinship to the human voice. He was in the choir at Juilliard, but it didn’t last.

“Before my voice changed, they loved having me,” he said with a laugh. “I think of myself as a singer in a way. I love what the human voice can do and in many ways I try to emulate that on my instrument.”

Tsang was born in Lansing, but was still in diapers when he left. His father, Paul Ja-Min Tsang, was finishing up a doctoral degree in metallurgy at Michigan State University. When his dad got a job at IBM, the family moved to Poughkeepsie. He was only 6 months old.

“I somehow feel that I remember that drive, and the snow on the side of the road,” he said. “I don’t know if that’s possible.”

He can refresh his dim memory of Michigan snow this week.

As a guest soloist, Tsang has to adapt to a wide range of skill levels, from the blue-ribbon philharmonics of New York and Moscow to plucky small-budget outfits like Lansing’s.

The never-ending problem for a cellist, he said, is simply being heard. Most cellos simply don’t project sound the way trumpets, pianos or even violins do. But recently, Tsang joined a small but growing number of cellists who are fighting back with more powerful hardware. For years, Tsang played an old Italian instrument from 1746, and got tired of coaxing the needed volume from it. Then he heard that a fellow cellist based in Texas, Andres Diaz, swapped his 1698 Matteo Goffriller cello, worth millions of dollars, for a new weapon of choice.

Tsang went to Dallas cello maker Wayne Burak and commissioned a new axe, with tungsten strings.

“I feel completely liberated,” Tsang said. “No matter how loud an orchestra plays, I still have a chance. Not that I want to give (LSO Music Director) Timothy (Muffitt) carte blanche to let ‘er rip.”

Muffitt built Saturday’s concert out of three tightly interlocking pieces. The “Rococo Variations” start from a melody Haydn could have written. A full-on Haydn symphony (No. 43, nicknamed “Mercury”) is the perfect go-with.

Then again, Muffitt doesn’t need much of a push to program Haydn, an underrated composer in modern times — at least when compared to his buddy Mozart — and one of the maestro’s favorites.

“There were many important composers that developed the classical style, whose music is OK if we keep it on the shelf,” Muffitt said. “But Haydn’s music is still so fresh and so engaging.”

The concert will end with Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony, the “Pastoral,” a cheap trip to a summer picnic, complete with dancing, beer (judging by the music’s brio and verve) and a bracing thunderstorm. The Sixth harks back to the classical lines of Beethoven’s teacher, Haydn, but also prefigures the drama and tunefulness of Tchaikovsky.

“It’s fun to put it in a program like this, where there is a deep connection between all of these pieces,” Muffitt said.

Lansing Symphony Orchestra

Bion Tsang, cello 8 p.m. Saturday, Jan. 10 Wharton Center Cobb Great Hall $15-50 (517) 487-5001, whartoncenter.com

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