Violinist to Play With an Old Friend : Miriam Fried will use a Stradivarius that she thinks might have been played by Mozart.

Audiences will be listening to one of the oldest violins ever heard in the Orange County Performing Arts Center when Miriam Fried plays Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto today and Thursday with the Pacific Symphony.

Fried owns a Stradivarius made in 1718 and once owned by composer Louis Spohr. But the pedigree and its mere age aren’t what tickle Fried as much as its possible connection with Mozart.

“It’s mostly fun because there is the vague chance that Mozart played it,” Fried said Monday from her hotel in Costa Mesa. “We know that he performed the premiere of one of the greatest violin and piano sonatas (in B-flat, K. 454) with (Regina Strinasacchi) who played this violin. I speculate he might have tried the violin. That’s very exciting, much more than the idea that it is that old. A lot of other things are that old.”

Fried wasn’t exactly looking for a new instrument when she acquired the violin six years ago in London. “I was quite happy with the violin I had before,” she said. “Then I looked at this and had to have it. . . It really gives you the feeling that the possibilities are unlimited. It’s up to you to find them.”

As for cost and value, she hesitated. “I would really not prefer to get in it,” she said. “It’s a dangerous thing. I don’t want to give anybody any ideas.”

Fried, who was born in Romania in 1946, moved to Israel with her family when she was 2. She started playing the piano when she was 5 and began the violin when she was 8. Her family did not pressure her to pursue either instrument as a professional career.

“In fact, my father wanted me to become a doctor,” she said. “I had a lot of support from them, though.” Support and pressure, she said, “are two different things. Probably no one can become a professional musician without having some kind of strong support from someone in the background.”

Fried’s playing caught the ear of Isaac Stern, who recommended that she pursue further studies abroad. She first studied in Genoa and later with the legendary Josef Gingold at Indiana University in Bloomington, where she and her husband, violinist Paul Biss, still live, with their two sons, who are 10 and 13.

Fried won her first major competition--the Paganini Contest in Genoa--in 1968. In 1971, she became the first woman to win first prize in the Queen Elisabeth International Competition in Brussels. After that, her career took off.

“I don’t think anybody can prepare you for the rigors of a career,” she said. “You have to be a very disciplined person, a very determined person, and it helps to be physically fit because it’s a demanding thing physically to be traveling around so much . . . It’s not as easy as it sounds. You have to be very strong, have a lot of energy and want to really do it.”

While she has played the Tchaikovsky Concerto numerous times over the years, her approach to the work has varied, but “I wouldn’t be a good one to tell you how,” she said.

“It’s not like I sit down on Jan. 1 and say, ‘Now it’s the first; I need to change my interpretation of Tchaikovsky.’ It doesn’t happen like that. It evolves over the years.

“Perhaps there are imperceptible changes in tempo, in emphasis, in approach, but mostly there are changes because I have changed as a person. As I grow older, I have more and more life experiences. I would have to be a total idiot not to have them affect how I play.”

One thing she has learned is how not to get psyched out. “I prefer not to ever think of a piece as hard or not hard because once you set yourself up for a concert by thinking, ‘This is very hard,’ you’re likely to stumble.

“There is so much of the psychological in all of this,” she said. “By the time you get to the point I’ve gotten with the violin, a lot of what happens occurs not with my fingers, but with my head.

“Obviously, I am capable of playing all these concertos OK. Otherwise I wouldn’t propose to do them. I’m not out to torture anyone in the audience or myself either. I want to have a good time. I consider performing a great privilege and a sharing experience. I don’t want to share fear, but pleasure . . .

“Of course, I try to communicate that which I feel about the piece, which is the only truth I know. Whether the audience hears it in that way or in another way that gives them pleasure is unimportant. I don’t think it’s the role of music to be too specific in meaning. I’m out there to give pleasure.”

Miriam Fried will be soloist in Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto with the Pacific Symphony led by Carl St. Clair today and Thursday at 8 p.m. at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. St. Clair also will conduct the Overture to Glinka’s “Russlan and Ludmilla” and Prokofiev’s Symphony No. 5. Tickets: $10 to $33. Information: (714) 474-2109.