Violinist Is Led to Crossroads by Success

At 19, violinist Sheryl Staples is finding success a bit of a problem. She is an orchestral musician who is simultaneously developing a career as a soloist (she will play Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto on Saturday with the Pacific Symphony at Irvine Meadows Amphitheatre), and she feels that she is at the crossroads.

“The most pressure I’m feeling is trying to decide what direction my career is going to take,” Staples said in an interview Tuesday.

“At this point in my life, I could make a lot more money playing professionally than playing solo. I’ve (also) been playing in some professional orchestras, and once you start doing that, you start getting calls to continue. One thing leads to another. Trying to juggle that is very tempting--just to start making money.”

Besides her solo playing, Staples has served as concertmaster for the past two seasons with the Los Angeles-based Young Musicians Debut Orchestra. Moving as she does between orchestras and chamber groups, Staples said, “they do sort of work against each other.”

Staples, a native of Los Angeles, began playing the violin when she was 5, after her parents gave her a small instrument that had belonged to her aunt. She came from a musical household, with a father who played trombone on Lawrence Welk’s television show for 17 years and a mother who is an amateur pianist and flutist.

“But they never pushed me,” she said. “They always let me play by my own choice.”

She has been studying with Robert Lipsett for the last 10 years and currently is a second-year scholarship student at the USC School of Music.

Staples made her first solo appearance with an orchestra when she was 12, playing Mozart’s Concerto No. 3 with the Sun Cities Orchestra in Sun City, Calif. She played with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, under the direction of Neal Stulberg, after winning the orchestra’s annual Young Artists Competition when she was 16.

The following year, Staples began playing with the Pacific Symphony on the orchestra’s Saturday morning youth programs. Subsequently, she has played with the orchestra in concerts outside of Orange County.

“The bulk of my repertory is Romantic music,” she said. “When you’re starting out, the pieces that audiences like to listen to are, for the most part, the Romantic concertos--Beethoven, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Sibelius. Just to get all those concerts under your belt is a feat.

“That is part of the problem of being a violinist. There is so much repertoire. It takes forever to learn all the different pieces.”

That challenge didn’t stop Staples from winning two national competitions in 1987 playing the Tchaikovsky Concerto: the Julius Stulberg Auditions in Michigan and the Young Performers Competition in Kingsville, Tex.

Staples calls the popular composition she will return to Saturday “an incredibly difficult piece, technically and just endurance-wise, because of its length.”

“It’s an amazingly difficult piece to get up to play. It doesn’t stay with you as long as you’d like it to. You have to go back and work out the same things. . . . You’re always having to look back at the score to find new ideas to keep it alive when you’re playing it, to keep the inspiration there.”

Staples said she is a big Heifetz fan, but in her playing, “I am not trying to copy Heifetz or (Itzhak) Perlman. I’m just trying to be myself and hope that the audience enjoys it.

“With everybody playing the same pieces, I think it’s really important that the audience does hear a different personality. I think that is what they want to hear. Everybody knows what the Tchaikovsky sounds like by now.”

Such familiarity carries its own pressures, and Staples isn’t afraid to admit to experiencing a little stage fright before performances. In fact, she thinks it is beneficial. “If you don’t get nervous, that’s not a good sign,” she said. “It means you don’t care anymore. . . . Probably you play better when you’re nervous.”

Sheryl Staples will be soloist in Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto with conductor Keith Clark and the Pacific Symphony at 8:30 p.m. on Saturday at Irvine Meadows Amphitheatre, 8000 Irvine Center Drive in Irvine. Also on the Tchaikovsky program will be the Symphony No. 5 and the “1812” Overture. Tickets: $10-$39. Information: (714) 972-1300.