Her Vigorous Violin

Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg, one of the most acclaimed violinists in the world, is a Jersey girl--the sort of girl celebrated by Bruce Springsteen, not by classical music mavens.

“There’s a certain pop, urban, down-home kind of girl,” explains Paolo di Florio, a Jersey girl herself, who directed a documentary about Salerno-Sonnenberg called “Speaking in Strings,” which can be seen on HBO Signature on Sunday. “She’s a no-BS kind of girl. There are no airs with this person. And I think that Nadja plays like that, she walks like that--it’s that ‘Don’t mess with me’ strut. That’s one of the things that I think make her so brilliant, because it gives her access to her feelings.”

It’s also what drives some critics nuts. In their eyes Salerno-Sonnenberg, 38, runs roughshod over sacred classical music texts, playing Ravel or Sibelius with all the nuance and restraint of Joe Cocker. She is very busy up there, her face expressing surprise, indignation, fear, ecstasy. She all but sets her violin on fire at the end of a piece. And it doesn’t end there.

While some performers who are demonstrative on stage or in front of a camera are actually quite shy and recessive in person, Salerno-Sonnenberg is anything but, as “Speaking in Strings” demonstrates. We learn that she behaves the way she does because she feels more than other people, which is both a blessing and a “damned curse.” Part of this is surely attributable to her early life.

Salerno-Sonnenberg was born in Rome, abandoned by her father when she was 3 months old, and moved to New York when she was 8 so that she could continue her violin studies. She could barely speak English and was ridiculed for her classical music tastes. At one point, she almost gave up the violin, but then was coaxed into entering a competition, which she won, making her debut at Carnegie Hall while she was still a teen.

From there it was onward and upward, going on the road as a soloist and appearing on “60 Minutes” and “The Tonight Show With Johnny Carson.”

The story doesn’t end here or happily, however. Salerno-Sonnenberg’s career was almost ruined when she sliced the tip off the little finger on her left hand cutting onions on a Christmas Day. And then, in the throes of a suicidal depression prompted by a seemingly endless life in hotel rooms and a failed relationship, she tried to commit suicide (the gun jammed). It was at this point that Di Florio approached Salerno-Sonnenberg about the documentary.

At the time Di Florio, formerly an actress and a filmmaker for Italian TV, CBS, NBC and PBS, was making documentaries for A&E.;

“It was right before her Carnegie Hall concert, the one that she plays two weeks after the attempted suicide,” Di Florio says of their first meeting. “She told me that it was a really tough time in her life. I had no idea that I was entering her life at such a delicate point.”

“I was not in any state not so much to agree to a documentary but think about what it could mean, the repercussions of it,” Salerno-Sonnenberg says. Nevertheless, she agreed, provisionally, to cooperate, chiefly because she and Di Florio were childhood friends--Di Florio had taken piano lessons from Salerno-Sonnenberg’s mother, and Di Florio’s father was the Salerno-Sonnenberg family gynecologist (“The best gynecologist in South Jersey!” says Salerno-Sonnenberg, laughing)--though they hadn’t seen each other in 10 years.

Di Florio put together some footage she had shot of the violinist, plus some concert film, and sent it to her, cementing the deal. Having secured Salerno-Sonnenberg’s blessing, Di Florio now had to raise money, gather archival footage and gain access to some of Salerno-Sonnenberg’s rehearsals with major orchestras so that she could show her at work rather than show her talking about work. Securing footage of Salerno-Sonnenberg performing was problematic at best because of orchestra union rules, and her television interviews were almost as difficult.

“I was turned down by ’60 Minutes’ initially, ‘Johnny Carson,’ ” Di Florio says. “I was told they never gave out their footage, they wouldn’t negotiate a deal. Concert footage would be impossible to get. And don’t forget this is my first independent film and nobody wants to talk to you. It eventually all worked out. Slowly.”

“Slowly” meaning three years. In the case of “60 Minutes” and the “Tonight Show,” Di Florio appealed directly to correspondent Morley Safer and Carson, both of whom made it happen, a testament, in Di Florio’s opinion, to their feelings about Salerno-Sonnenberg. She also managed to get Marin Alsop, music director of the Colorado Symphony, to open up its rehearsals with Salerno-Sonnenberg. In addition to these special guests, she was able to interview Salerno-Sonnenberg’s mother, friends, colleagues and critics. And there is always Salerno-Sonnenberg, smoking, complaining about her stringy hair, and, in one memorable sequence, illustrating the importance of work, health and love in her life, with love at the bottom of the heap, represented by a cigarette butt.

Though Di Florio is quick to say that Salerno-Sonnenberg wouldn’t use a cigarette butt now, she’s close-mouthed about the violinist’s love life, as is the movie. This is noticeable because Salerno-Sonnenberg is so open about everything else, and her breakdown was precipitated in part by someone leaving her.

“That was a tough choice for me to make,” Di Florio says. “And it was a choice I don’t regret at all. It took away from the story at that moment, what we were focusing on. It became a bit of a soap opera. And I realized then that that wasn’t the reason why things went south for her. It was not one thing. And it never is in someone’s life.

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“This is Nadja’s story, but the reason it’s so powerful and the reason I wanted to communicate this story was not because it was one individual’s drama but because it was something that everyone can relate to. It’s when the forces of the universe are conspiring to make you either drastically change your life or when you just can’t see the meaning of life. It was an existential crisis.”

Critics generally embraced the documentary’s power in exploring that crisis. In writing about the film, which had a limited release in theaters, Times film critic Kenneth Turan noted: “Its portrait of controversial virtuoso violinist Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg is as vivid and unstoppable as the woman herself: You don’t need to know who she is or even much care about classical music to be gripped, even flabbergasted by what’s on the screen.”

Asked if she’s made uncomfortable by anything in the documentary, Salerno-Sonnenberg, who’s on the road now more than ever and has become slightly more acceptable to the musical establishment, says, “It’s a hard film for me to watch in lots of way. There are so many things in there that make me feel melancholy, and then there are a few scenes that I’d rather not think about. The finger thing is a day I never want to relive. I’m not unhealthy about any of that. I think I came through that time the best door possible. We mostly do survive bad times in our lives, and we all have them.”

* “Speaking in Strings” will be shown at 7:45 p.m. Sunday on HBO Signature.