Google Lucia Micarelli, the Lansing Symphony’s guest soloist this week, and the “People Also Ask” section opens with the question “Is Lucia Micarelli a real violinist?”
This Friday, Micarelli is tackling one of the biggest concertos in the repertoire, the vast and craggy Sibelius violin concerto.
Come on, how real do you want it?
People who only know Micarelli from her role as New Orleans street violinist Annie in HBO’s acclaimed “Treme” series (or from heart-warming turn in the Hallmark movie “The Christmas Bow”) can be forgiven for asking.
No matter what you call “real,” Micarelli probably has you covered. On her regular touring show, she flips from bluegrass to Led Zeppelin to Ravel to Tom Waits without batting an eye.
“My brain doesn’t separate genres of music,” she said in a phone interview last week. “I’ve had such a weird musical education.”
Her life was front-loaded with classical training from the likes of Pinchas Zukerman, Itzhak Perlman and even from Perlman’s teacher, the legendary Dorothy DeLay. It’s not that she got it out of her system early. She still loves to play the classics. Her system just needed more high-octane fuel.
Barely 20 years old, straight out of Juilliard and the Manhattan School of Music, she got the itch to stretch out and started moonlighting with local jazz and rock bands. Before long, she was sawing away with the vein-bursting Trans-Siberian Orchestra and touring with crossover stars like Josh Groban, Barbra Streisand and Ian Anderson’s flutey, meta-medieval rock band, Jethro Tull.
“I’ve had this great privilege of being exposed to so many different kinds of music, and learning about them from greats in those fields,” she said. “I don’t feel like I’m switching hats. I think of it all as music that I love.”
Throughout October, she was diving into the Sibelius to get ready for her Lansing gig, while doing her own poly-stylistic shows in Berkeley, Sacramento and the Festival Mozaic in San Luis Obispo.
“I might be leaning on different things in my toolbox, but in my mind, in how I feel emotionally, my approach is the same,” she said. “I’m trying to express emotionally a story, or what I feel, musically, and that process is the same no matter what I’m playing.”
Before talking with Micarelli, I couldn’t shake the feeling that her name rang another, non-HBO, non-Sibelius bell for me. A hasty search through a box of dusty cassette tapes confirmed that Ian Anderson mentioned her in an interview for City Pulse when Jethro Tull came to the Wharton Center 15 years ago.
“We are so honored to have her as she graces the stage with her 21 years and her bare feet,” Anderson told me back then. Micarelli still plays barefoot.
For proof of her seamless, committed approach to all kinds of music, check out a YouTube clip from her 2018 PBS special, “An Evening with Lucia Micarelli,” and watch her skydive from serene, seagull-high swoops of Sibelius straight into the Cyclopean stomping of Led Zeppelin’s epic “Kashmir” without so much as a change of snood.
LSO music director Timothy Muffitt was floored by the “Kashmir” clip, but it left him unsatisfied.
“I wanted to hear her do the rest of the Sibelius,” he said, diplomatically withholding the implied “Duh.”
Actually, Micarelli has already worked with Muffitt, while they were both touring with pop trumpeter-composer Chris Botti.
“I adore him,” Micarelli said. “I’m really excited that we’re going to have this adventure together.”
The Sibelius adventure won’t take us to “Kashmir” Friday, but the concerto is one of the most compelling ever written, a brooding idyll of windswept Nordic moods.
“I learned it a million years ago, when I was young, and it’s always been one of my favorite concertos, because it’s so epic,” Micarelli said. “Even without the solo violin part, it’s already this incredible symphony. The orchestration is really, really special, and it’s quite involved, rhythmically. Things come back but they’re slightly rhythmically different. There’s many, many things happening at once, a lot of interplay with the musicians.”
Friday’s concert will open with the work of a living composer, Jessie Montgomery’s lyrical “Strum” for string orchestra, and close with Robert Schumann’s Symphony No. 4, a close match with the Sibelius concerto when it comes to epic sweep and roiling emotions.
Perhaps because she performs in so many different styles and settings, Micarelli is far from jaded about riding the force waves of a symphony orchestra.
“That first rehearsal, the first time it’s really loud, it feels like a blast of wind. It’s really amazing,” she said. “An orchestral performance is so visceral and exciting, not only to watch and listen to, but also to be a part of. It’s a pretty unusual thing to be in collaboration with 60, 80 people at once, all together and live, creating something.”
She stepped back further, taking an even longer view of her chosen life.
“Isn’t it wild that music exists? It’s so amazing that music, somehow, came into the world.”
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