Violinist not afraid to let her bluegrass background shine through

So far it’s been a wonderful year for violin lovers, with familiar names like Cho-Liang Lin and Sarah Chang performing here recently and Midori coming in April. On Sunday, Tessa Lark makes her Hawaii debut.

Along with a slew of awards and critical praise, Lark brings a background in bluegrass to the stage.

The 26-year-old Kentucky native won the prestigious 2012 Naumberg Competition in New York and received a silver medal at the International Violin Competition of Indianapolis in 2014— the best finish by an American-born violinist in the competition’s 24-year history. Despite that success, she doesn’t really like the competition circuit.

“I have yet to meet someone who considers those things fun,” she said. “But it’s certainly been worth it because it leads to opportunities to perform in places like Hawaii.”

Her performances since then have fulfilled the promise of that recognition. “Lark brought superb technical chops as well as an inquisitive, musical mind to her performance,” wrote Jonathan Blomhofer of the Boston online arts magazine Art Fuse after a performance of Mendelssohn, praising her rich tone and nuanced vibrato.

Lark will perform Saint-Saens’ lovely third violin concerto with the Hawai‘i Symphony Orchestra.

The piece, written for the composer’s favorite violinist, is “chock-full of melodies that I absolutely adore,” Lark said. “It’s simply beautiful. It’s not music that’s trying to be extremely profound in any way, it’s mostly simple, and so I feel that since the path is paved pretty straight in that way harmonically, then there’s a little more time to stop and smell a rose.”

The piece is also noted for the second movement, which concludes with a passage in which the violinist plays high harmonics for a stretch, creating an unusual sonority with the clarinet playing two octaves lower.

“Every teacher or violinist I’ve talked to about this particular concerto has told me, ‘I’ve heard so many people eat it when those harmonics come,’” she said. “I’ve been trying to play the harmonics while doing a headstand, playing it by a wood chopper, making it as difficult as possible for myself.”

Aside from her studies in classical music, Lark attended fiddle camps as a youth and grew up playing bluegrass with her father, an accomplished banjo player — there’s a charming YouTube video of them playing at the New England Conservatory of Music, where she graduated in 2013. She treated bluegrass as a musical “dessert” to the heavy meal of classical studies.

“I was quite diligent about scheduling my practice,” said Lark, who is pursuing further studies at Juilliard. “I would do 30 minutes to an hour of scales, probably an hour of Bach, an hour of whatever sonata I was working on, another hour on a concerto, so it would amount to four- or five-hour days. … Bluegrass would be something where my dad would come home from work and take out his banjo and ask if I wanted to jam with him, and then we would learn a couple of songs together.”

She often incorporates some bluegrass into her classical performances, saying “it sounds awesome” on the Stradivarius violin she performs on. “It makes a great fiddle, actually,” she said. “I’ve coined a new genre term. I like to call it ‘Stradgrass.’ There’s something about the quality of this instrument. You can really make it do so many things, but it does have this throaty yet nasal quality to it, and that just lends itself so well to bluegrass and Appalachian music.”

Renowned British conductor Christopher Seaman leads the orchestra in a program that includes Cesar Franck’s moody Symphony in D minor.