Young Violinist Reflects on Her Dizzying Decade : Musician: Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg, who plays O.C. Monday, rocketed into the limelight. Now she wants to focus on more personal pursuits.

It’s been a long, hard decade for violinist Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg. And at 29, her career still booming, she now wants to concentrate on other, less professional areas of her life.

“Over the last year, I’ve just been overwhelmed by it all,” she said in a telephone conversation from her home in New York. “My 20s went by really fast. I think I’ve made all the right decisions, but as I turn 30, my goal is to schedule things so I enjoy my life a little more.”

She performs Monday at the Orange County Performing Arts Center with pianist Cecile Licad--a longtime collaborator and childhood friend--in a program of violin sonatas by Mozart, Beethoven and Brahms.

The event is being sponsored by the Orange County Philharmonic Society.

“I still give about 15 to 20 recitals a year,” said Salerno-Sonnenberg. “Cecile and I last collaborated about two years ago, and it’s great to team up with her again. We’ll have a recording coming out again soon.”

Born in Rome and holding dual citizenship, in both Italy and America, Salerno-Sonnenberg speaks English like a native, with all of the colloquialisms that anyone growing up on the East Coast would acquire. She is also fluent in Italian and even Sicilian, a dialect she picked up from her grandparents.

Her hyphenated name, she said, “is the result of combining my mother’s last name--which gives me some Italian flavor--with my ex-stepfather’s. I’ve never been married.”

She remembers her early music lessons in Italy with Antonio Marchetti and his advice that her potential would best be realized in the United States. When she was 8, her family moved to New Jersey, where she studied with Jascha Brodsky at the Curtis Institute and was one of the first enrollees in its preparatory division.

She moved to New York at 17 on a scholarship to study at Juilliard. Three years later, she won the Naumberg Award, which launched her solo career so quickly that she left school. She never graduated.

“I don’t excel in a mold,” she observed. “At Juilliard, I was lucky to have a teacher like Dorothy DeLay, who became almost like a surrogate mother to me and taught me the basics of playing the fiddle. I was a very stubborn student and insisted on doing things my way. Then, when I got too frustrated with a passage of music, I’d go to her and ask her why I couldn’t play it. She recognized my need for freedom, and that helped me a lot.”

Her tours of the world, performing with the finest of orchestras, conductors and other artists, brought a tidal wave of publicity. Young, attractive and talented, Salerno-Sonnenberg found herself chased by throngs of journalists throughout America.

“It was all that media stuff that really made things jump,” she recalled. “Someone would write an article on me which someone else would read and would want to write another article and so forth and so on.

“Then you fly into a big city, look up and suddenly you see your picture where you didn’t expect it. I remember doing a bit on ’60 Minutes’ and the next morning I had an offer for the lead role in a major Hollywood movie. You start to lose track of it all.”

Violinist Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg and pianist Cecile Licad play sonatas by Mozart, Beethoven and Brahms on Monday at 8 p.m. at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Tickets: $8 to $25. Presented by the Orange County Philharmonic Society. Information: (714) 556-2787.