Tucson Symphony opens season with violin prodigy

“It was a very sweet moment,” Olmeda recalled. “I was tearing up. It was so sweet, and the whole audience started singing. That was a very special moment for me.”

Tucson might add another special moment to the young musician’s growing résumé when she makes her debut with the Tucson Symphony Orchestra on Friday, Sept. 25, at Linda Ronstadt Music Hall. It is the first of two concerts she will play with the orchestra as this season’s artist-in-residence.

“I've never done this before so I think it's gonna be a lot of fun,” Olmeda said during an August phone call from her home in Maryland. “I think it's going to be so wonderful because one of the harder parts about traveling is that you're in one city for two, three days and you make so many wonderful connections with people and then you have to leave. So I think it's going to be great that I get to come back and be like, ‘Hey guys, let's go play some more’.”

In addition to this weekend’s performances, Olmeda will return in December for an Up Close chamber concert that she programmed. Among the works is Jessie Montgomery’s “Musings” for two violins that she will perform with TSO Associate Concertmaster Ludek Wojtkowski.

“I chose all pieces that I performed before that feel very intimate and I can really draw the audience in,” she said of the concert on Dec. 12-13. “I want it to be very intimate.”

This is the first time Olmeda, winner of the 2021 Sphinx Competition junior division, will perform in Arizona.

“She's getting so much attention, rightly so, from everywhere in this country — other organizations, other orchestras — and in the world,” said TSO Music Director José Luis Gomez, who will conduct Friday’s season-opening “Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto” concert at Linda Ronstadt Music Hall. “It's great that we had the chance to get her at this moment of her career in which she's blossoming and making an impact everywhere she goes.”

Olmeda admits she still can’t wrap her head around the idea that what she is doing in Tucson is her “career.”

“I just go and play,” she said. “Like, I'm still in school. I still have to work. I still play badly in my life sometimes. But you know, I do feel very lucky, and it is really crazy to me that I can do this for a living. It's so fun.”

On Friday, Olmeda will be playing a work she heard as a kid growing up on the family’s hobby farm in Northern California.

“I'm a young kid and I'm like, ‘Oh, one day I'm gonna play the concerto’,” she said.

She recounted how Tchaikovsky’s concerto was a critical failure when it premiered with the Vienna Philharmonic in 1881.

“All the critics were extremely mean and they said it was a horrible concerto,” she said. “But now you think about it today and it's one of the most loved concertos ever written. It's a beautiful piece. It's just so lyrical. (Tchaikovsky) was able to create so many twisting worlds and all these runs and it just continues and it grows and it builds. I don't know how to explain it. It's just such a beautiful world that he's created within the concerto, and I'm just so excited to bring it to Tucson. It's going to be so much fun.”

This will be only the second time that Olmeda, who has been soloing with orchestras since she was 12, has performed the work in concert. She played it in Boulder, Colorado, two years ago in what she described as a “whirlwind experience.”

“It's a concerto that you really can communicate not only to the audience but also to the orchestra members,” said Olmeda, who comes here just weeks after starting her sophomore year at the New England Conservatory of Music. “I think that's one of my favorite things about playing is that … I'll have like a little melody or something, and then I play it with like the flute or I play it with violins, and it's just so nice to have that interactive experience on the stage.”

On Friday, Olmeda will play the rare 1796 Nicola Bergonzi violin, loaned to her last year by the Reuning & Son Violins of Massachusetts.

“It's a beautiful instrument. The sound is incredible, and I love the way it sounds on the stage,” she said.

The historic instrument is a far cry from the tiny violin she started playing when she was a toddler.

She discovered the violin when she was barely able to walk and would tag along to older brother Peter’s violin lessons.

“My mom tells me that I was really quiet and I would always sit very still and listen,” she recounted. ”I guess that's what sparked my interest. When I got to a place where I could walk and talk, I was like, ‘I want to play’.”

By the time she was 12, Olmeda had performed with a number of orchestras including the San Francisco Chamber Orchestra, Auburn Symphony and the Music in the Mountains Orchestra at the Summerfest Music Series in Lake Tahoe. At 16, she made her solo debut at Lincoln Center; later that year, she performed on the New York Philharmonic’s Kravis Nightcap Series with violinist Hilary Hahn.

She has performed with more than a dozen orchestras from Buffalo to Boulder, with critics praising her “intense lyricism,” “charismatic stage presence” and “jaw-dropping virtuosity,” traits that don’t really cross her mind when she’s on stage.

“I am actively thinking I want to bring the best to the audience. I want to show them the beautifulness of all these pieces,” she said. “I want to show them what I love about the pieces.”

This weekend’s concert at the Music Hall, 260 S. Church Ave., opens Gomez’s 10th year at the TSO podium. Performances are at 7:30 p.m. Friday, Sept. 25, and 2 p.m. Sunday, Sept. 27. Tickets are $21-$115.48 through tucsonsymphony.org.

The Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto is bookended by Silvestre Revueltas’s “Sensemayá” and Strauss’s “Ein Heldenleben.”