JUILLIARD’S NEW VIOLINIST

Joel Smirnoff, the newest member of the Juilliard Quartet, did not come up through the ranks of string quartet players.

Instead, the New York-born musician, who completed his training at the Juilliard School after a short detour as a history major at the University of Chicago, tried a succession of other musical assignments:

He played in the Boston Symphony for five years. He dabbled in blues bands. He was a free-lance concertmaster in the Chicago area. Briefly, he specialized in contemporary music with different ensembles in different cities. As a soloist, he won second prize in the 1983 Carnegie Hall International American Music Competition.

And, in the 31 years since he began playing the violin, he did a lot of quartet-playing.

“When I was 13, I joined a group that in two years played all 80 quartets by Haydn,” Smirnoff recalled, on the phone from Washington, where the Juilliard Quartet was opening its winter season at the Library of Congress.

The 36-year-old violinist joined the 40-year-old ensemble on July 1. Isn’t joining an ongoing quartet roughly comparable to arriving hours late at a party? he was asked.

“No, it doesn’t work quite that way,” Smirnoff explained. “You see, from the point of view of the other three (violinist Robert Mann, violist Samuel Rhodes and cellist Joel Krosnick), they want my input as much as I want theirs. They’re dying to pick my brain. Really. They’re always looking for a new insight.”

The kinds of performances that grow out of all this “commitment and exuberance” have kept the Juilliard group at the top of its profession for four decades. At Ambassador Auditorium Tuesday night, the ensemble returns to open a three-concert series with Bach’s evening-long “Art of Fugue.”

“It’s awesome, isn’t it?” Smirnoff asked rhetorically. “A mountain. And, as in climbing a mountain, one has to prepare, to organize, to plan a method.

“We use transitional Baroque bows because they are lighter, a smidgen shorter and more flexible than the bows we use for other repertory. Lightness is just one of the qualities this music demands.”

One basic question, Smirnoff said, is “how best to illuminate the voices so they can be heard and followed.”

Of course, performing Bach’s final work “is as great an emotional experience as it is an intellectual one.”

Subsequent events on the Juilliard series are scheduled for Jan. 29 and April 23.

ORCHESTRALLY: Daniel Lewis is guest conductor with the Los Angeles Philharmonic for the next fortnight. In the Pavilion of the Music Center, his program this week (Thursday and Saturday nights at 8, Friday at 1 p.m. and next Sunday at 2:30 p.m.) lists Walter Piston’s Symphony No. 4, the Piano Concerto of Robert Schumann (with Alicia de Larrocha as soloist) and Bizet’s Symphony in C. . . . Because of the cancellation (due to “financial difficulties”) of the United States tour of Camerata Academica Salzburg, trumpeter Maurice Andre will perform at Ambassador Auditorium in Pasadena on Wednesday and Thursday nights with an ensemble that has been inactive for two years, Henri Temianka’s California Chamber Symphony. Andre & Friends will play the same program twice. It lists music by Handel, Mozart, Albinoni, A. Marcello and Benjamin Britten.

PEOPLE AND ENSEMBLES: Soprano Mary Lou Fallis appears in her one-woman satirical show, “Primadonna,” Thursday through Friday nights at 8 in Murphy Recital Hall at Loyola Marymount University. . . . Violinist Lyndon Taylor, a member of the faculty at the University of Redlands, won second place in the Fifth International Violin Competition in Gorizia, Italy, last month. Taylor will appear as soloist with the South Coast Symphony, John Larry Granger conducting, Saturday night at 8:15 at Orange Coast College in Costa Mesa.