MUSIC : Living in Time Present and Time Past : Violinist Joshua Bell, Who Starred in 1st Classical Video Single, Yearns for the Golden Age

Joshua Bell apologized for being late to the phone, having just stepped into his Soho apartment after hurtling down a New York street on foot on the way home from the barber. It was, in a sense, a fitting episode in the life of this young, good-looking, one-time Wunderkind of the violin, now a seasoned artist at 23 with six CDs under his belt and a crowded concert calendar.

Bell doesn’t mind the hectic pace; indeed, he claims to enjoy the lifestyle of a globe-trotting virtuoso. One day, perhaps, when he starts a family, he may slow down a bit and take on some students. But not now.

In case you haven’t been reading news magazines lately, suddenly there is a bumper crop of young violin whizzes overrunning concert halls and CD shops. As one of them, Bell frequently touches down in Southern California, returning tonight and Thursday at the Orange County Performing Arts Center for dates with the Pacific Symphony.

Indeed, Bell could claim to be one of the pioneers in the current wave of efforts to market young classical musicians as if they were rock stars. About four years ago, just after Bell signed with the Decca/London label, Decca’s parent corporation asked him to star in the first classical video single.

Filmed in black and white in Culver City (“in the studio where they made ‘Gone With the Wind,’ ” Bell says), the video finds Bell--looking every inch the sensitive, sexy matinee idol--playing the Brahms Hungarian Dance No. 1 while sultry Karen Black looks on, lasciviously smoking a cigarette. It was released commercially as a CD-video single in Europe, but only for promotional purposes in the United States, where A&E; and even VH-1 occasionally gave it a spin. Though the video was ridiculed by critics, it paved the way for this year’s enormously successful full-length video of violinist Nigel Kennedy playing the Brahms concerto.

“I thought it was neat; I like trying new things,” Bell said, recalling that the film crew made “maybe 50 takes” of him playing silently to a prerecorded soundtrack. “I guess they picked me to do it because I was young and more in style with what a music video is. I don’t think this is the future for classical music, but I didn’t see any harm in it.

“Unfortunately, I didn’t have any artistic input, and if I were ever to do it again, I would like to be more a part of it. The video didn’t attempt to capture Brahms on video. In a way, it is almost better that they didn’t; it would be very dangerous to try.”

Yet, despite the high-tech promotional strategies, Bell’s heart is planted mostly in the past, back in a violinist’s Golden Age that was personified by his esteemed teacher in Bloomington, Ind., Josef Gingold (who, in turn, was a student of the Belgian virtuoso Eugene Ysaye). When he went to Meadowmount summer music camp in Upstate New York at age 12, Bell was introduced to ancient, hissing 78s of Jascha Heifetz, Mischa Elman, Fritz Kreisler and other legends of the past--and the discoveries haunted him.

He rhapsodizes about the way violinists in the first half of the century were permitted to develop their own personalities, to go their own ways in interpreting pieces. Indeed, Bell has picked up on one of the old school’s long-lost arts: writing his own cadenzas for the big violin concertos. (Bell will play his own cadenza in the Mozart Violin Concerto No. 5 tonight).

Then again, in this note-perfect, by-the-book age, would an Elman or a Kreisler be laughed off the stage today for the liberties they took?

“Yeah . . . ,” Bell starts out, but then the violinist thinks it over, his halting voice still revealing a trace of his old childhood shyness. “Well, I don’t know, for there are some modern players who take liberties,” though he declines to name names.

“I’m sorry they’re gone,” he said, referring to the old-school violinists, “because people are so worried about playing tastefully in the style of the composers that they lose touch. (These musicians) were composers themselves, so it was as if they would compose on the spot. Now we’ve all become specialists--and with the early-music fad, I think we can sometimes lose sight of the fact that music isn’t some kind of a museum piece.”

Interestingly, Bell himself has been criticized for sticking to the meat-and-potatoes concerto repertoire in concert and on recordings, thus perpetuating the museum syndrome. But lately that has been changing, for Bell is slowly but surely taking an interest in more contemporary pieces.

Nicholas Maw has written a new concerto for Bell, which he will unveil next year at Carnegie Hall with Roger Norrington and the Orchestra of St. Luke’s (which commissioned the work). Two more commissions on the way are a violin sonata by Ned Rorem and a concerto by an Iranian composer named Bezhad Ranjbaron.

As far as his own taste goes, though, Bell shies away from the cutting edge.

“I tend to like music that is melodic and not completely atonal,” he says. “I have a hard time with the Schoenberg concerto; Berg is another story, it’s a great piece, definitely a Romantic at heart. But if the music sounds ugly, there’s just no point. If I’m bored by it, there’s a good chance the audience will be bored by it too.”

Despite the public demand for the standards, which by all odds he will be fulfilling for the rest of his career, Bell still believes that he finds new things to say about them every time out. Most of them, at least.

“The great music, which I’ve done a lot, I never seem to get tired of,” he says. “In a great piece of music, you can go deeper and deeper into it and find new things in it. For something like the Bruch concerto, I played it a lot and felt it wasn’t really going anywhere. I started to get a little tired of it and stopped playing it four years ago.

“I’m careful not to ever feel, ‘Oh God, the 123rd performance of a piece.’ If it starts to feel like that, I start to play other things. It’s easy to get in a rut, play the Mendelssohn the same way, same fingerings.

“The Sibelius is a very difficult one,” he adds. “The Beethoven and Brahms are always difficult, especially the Beethoven because it’s so pure and exposed and, at the same time, very technically demanding. I’m never bored with something like that.”

* Violinist Joshua Bell joins conductor Carl St. Clair and the Pacific Symphony in Mozart’s Violin Concerto No. 5 in A tonight and Thursday at 8 p.m. at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Also on the program: Christopher Rouse’s “The Infernal Machine”; and Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 4 in F-minor. A free concert preview with Pacific Symphony composer-in-residence Frank Ticheli is at 7 p.m. Tickets: $12 to $36. Information: (714) 556-2787.