In many ways, violinist Joshua Bell has lived a charmed life. A prodigy who made the successful transition into a much-lauded adult career as a concert violinist, his cachet extends to television—the gamut of the “Tonight Show” to “Sesame Street”—and motion pictures. His solo performance on the sound track for the 1998 film “The Red Violin” won the Academy Award for best original score, a complement to the Grammy he won for his recording of the 1993 Nicholas Maw Violin Concerto dedicated to him. He has recorded some 30 CDs, and his 2003, “The Romance of the Violin,” sold five million copies.

But Bell knows that recognition is closely linked to well-packaged presentation, and not simply the reaction to the beauty of his music making. In a widely reported experiment three years ago set up by the Washington Post (and a story that won the writer Gene Weingarten a Pulitzer Prize), Bell posed as an anonymous busker in a busy D.C. Metro station during the morning rush hour, playing the works of J. S. Bach and other classical gems on his treasured Stradivarius violin. He attracted no crowd of listeners—only one person actually recognized him—and his take from his open violin case would not have purchased dinner for two in a modest Washington restaurant.

Violinist Josh Bell.

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There was nothing hidden about the Bell brand name surrounding his recital Friday (February 19) at Copley Symphony Hall for the La Jolla Music Society; however, and he filled the 2,200-seat room. As a soloist, Bell projects a modesty that serves as the perfect foil to his abundant technical prowess.

Bell chose a demanding program, four violin and piano sonatas that place equal, stringent requirements on both players. He and pianist, Jeremy Denk, dispatched these works with precision and great attention to stylistic nuance. They will play this same program in a few days at Carnegie Hall, and they are ready for that scrutiny.

I was enthralled with their lucid take on Maurice Ravel’s G Major Sonata, especially the radiant duos in the highest registers of the two instruments. These abstract dialogues, notably in the opening movement, reveal the composer’s avant-garde edge (the piece comes from 1927) that his contemporaries were eager to deny.

Igor Stravinsky snidely dismissed Ravel as a Swiss clockmaker, but as we look back on that neo-classical period of western music, it turns out that Stravinsky was more the didactic contrapuntalist who lacked even a portion of Ravel’s melodic talent. Bell gave ravishing flight to every melodic inspiration Ravel provided the violin in this G Major Sonata. And they were many.

Bell and Denk carefully preserved the meticulous artifice of the Sonata's middle movement, which Ravel titled “Blues.” In the year following Violin Sonata's premiere, while lecturing students at Houston’s Rice University, Ravel made it clear that he was not imitating the louche freedom of American jazz, but simply grafting a few of its obvious harmonic and rhythmic characteristics onto his own precise style. Bell and Denk kept Ravel’s quotation marks firmly in place. The finale, a daunting “perpetuum mobile,” rushed past like a canyon wildfire in a dry fall season, with every note intact.

Robert Schumann’s A Minor Sonata, Op. 105, gave Bell the ripe opportunity to coax throaty, viola sonorities from his Strad and indulge the composer’s manic thematic thrusts with vigor. Yet Bell effortlessly morphed into the middle movement’s trance-like cantilena and, at other times, puckish humor. There was not much humor in Camille Saint-Saens’ D Minor Sonata, Op. 75, a studied and perhaps over-written work with gymnastic feats for each player on every page. If it was easy to admire the facility and flourish of Bell and Denk, it required patience to endure the composer’s long-winded constructions.

Opening the program with J. S. Bach’s C Minor Sonata, BWV 1017 proved daring, considering the size of the room. This exquisite chamber music invites a close appreciation of the intricate counterpoint between the pianist’s right hand and the violinist’s serpentine themes, but in the expansive space and somewhat indistinct acoustics of Copley Hall, it became difficult to follow these lines with pristine perception. The performers were clearly devoting loving attention to Bach’s constant interplay of ideas, but the whole audience would have had to come on stage to appreciate such definition.

After such a full evening, Bell and Denk offered a single encore, Fritz Kreisler’s “Slavonic Fantasy,” an homage to Antonin Dvorak that extensively quotes that composer’s “Songs My Mother Taught Me.” For my taste, it was just the right amount of heart-on-the-sleeve sentiment, and not a moment too soon.

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