Finely Tuned

Ever since the 1989 appointment of Esa-Pekka Salonen as music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the City of the Angels has been tapping the wealth of musical talent nurtured in Scandinavia.

Orange County gets a chance to savor the talents of another rising star from the northern climes when violinist Judith Ingolfsson, a native of Iceland, appears Saturday with the Pacific Symphony led by Patrick Summers at Irvine Meadows Amphitheatre.

“Iceland has a very small population, only 250,000,” Ingolfsson, 26, said Monday in a telephone interview from her current home in Cleveland. “But it’s an extremely lively country. They have a symphony orchestra, an opera and now even a chamber orchestra. All in Reykjavik, the capital.”

Ingolfsson, who won first prize at the 1998 International Violin Competition of Indianapolis and received the 1999 Debut Artist of the Year Award from NPR Performances, was born into a musical family, the second of four daughters.

Her mother, a Swiss, was a pianist; her father, a native of Iceland, is a pianist and a mathematician who now teaches math in Philadelphia.

Despite her parents’ love of the keyboard, Ingolfsson said, she was “extremely uninterested in the piano. I still am.”

Instead, she took to the violin, pointing to the instrument at a concert her mother took her to when she was 3, and saying she wanted to play it. Soon, she was taking lessons with the concertmaster of the Icelandic Symphony.

“He was very, very kind to me,” she said. “He had a big shaggy dog, and he would smoke his pipe. He taught me how to hold a violin, how to play it a little bit. . . . His wife taught me to conduct with spaghetti sticks. That was a big thing for me.

“I was always very attached to the violin emotionally, but I don’t think I was the world’s most enthusiastic practicer. I remember my [cellist] sister Mirjan being more into practicing.

“But I absolutely adored performing and--there’s no way around it--you can’t perform well unless you practice.

“It does take a lot of discipline, and sometimes you have to sacrifice,” she added. “But my family was quite large, and it’s a quite tightly knit family. So I did have that support emotionally.”

The family came to the United States when she was 7, moving from state to state as her father found different jobs.

She started studies at 14 at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. She graduated with a bachelor’s degree at 19 and went to the Cleveland Institute of Music for a master’s degree.

“Sometimes, just for fun, I’ll listen to a recording of myself as a kid playing the Mendelssohn concerto when I was 11. I have another recording playing it more than 10 years later, when I was 22.

“It’s fascinating. You can tell it is the same person, but there is a different level of maturity and another level of technical experience. . . . That is just a revealing thing. A musician can have a personality and individuality at that early age.”

Though still youthful, Ingolfsson knows she can no longer be regarded as a wunderkind that audiences and the music industry tend to dote on.

“I’m completely aware that there are many people out there in the professional world who are half my age,” said Ingolfsson, who made her concerto debut in Germany at 8. “But as far as whether a 13- or an 8-year-old can have something to say about the Beethoven concerto: A genuinely musical child will just play the music with a child’s eye.

“In defense of these children, I don’t think it’s fair to say that the way they view the world is less valid than an adult’s view. . . . A child’s performance can be particularly touching. It can be so innocent and untouched by the rigors and hardships of adult life.

“I’ve been there, although I didn’t jump into the big limelight at that age. But I did have plenty of opportunities. I can sympathize with that.”

The violinist’s performances frequently have been called poetic and lyrical.

“That goes very much in sync with how I view the violin as an extension of my voice,” Ingolfsson said. “People also say I’m an intelligent player, which is kind of a funny comment. Basically, I do communicate to the audience or I try to communicate that I have a certain message and something specific to say. I do feel that music is like a language in that sense. . . .

“I can play something for people of so many different origins or languages, and it will cross all those barriers. The emotional content, the message, is still the same. It’s basically human.”

For her Orange County debut, she will play Mozart’s Concerto No. 5, a work “particularly close to me because I have grown with it over the years,” she said.

“Mozart is the kind of music that can be extremely personal. It lends itself to growth. The Mozart concerto has a childlike aspect, a certain transparency that makes it particularly revealing. There’s so much you can do with it and do so much on the spur of the moment. It’s very spontaneous.”

She will play the work on the “ex-Gingold” 1683 Stradivari violin, formerly owned by violinist Josef Gingold. As the winner of the Indianapolis competition, Ingolfsson gets the use of the instrument for four years.

“This particular violin has a very warm and expansive sound,” she said. “It’s an early Strad, so it’s not a power machine in the sense that it doesn’t cut through an orchestra in an aggressive way. I like that very much. It sounds very vocal.

“It definitely has a distinct personality. At first, it was quite overwhelming. I had never played a violin with kind of distinctive sound. It’s like talking to somebody with a very distinct personality. It forces you to be very distinct yourself.

“It demands things from the performer, and it demands things that I didn’t know I could do. The possibilities are limitless, which was not the case before. The more possibilities, the more you learn, if you keep your mind open to it. I feel very honored to play this violin. I may be getting spoiled by it, as well.”

* Violinist Judith Ingolfsson will play Mozart’s Concerto No. 5 with the Pacific Symphony, led by guest conductor Patrick Summers, at 8 p.m. Saturday at Irvine Meadows Amphitheatre, 8808 Irvine Center Drive. The “Night in Old Vienna” program” also will include works by Strauss, Lehar and other composers. $14-$57. (714) 755-5799.

Pasles can be reached by e-mail at Chris.Pasles@latimes.com.