Fiddler off the grid

Gilles Apap is right at home whether playing a Bach concerto or a bluegrass jam

A couple of years ago, an eight-minute video on Youtube lit up the online classical music world. Still up on the Web, it shows a casually dressed violinist performing an outlandishly genre-bending cadenza to Mozart's Violin Concerto No. 3. Instead of spinning out the usual virtuoso variations on the work's themes, this man launches into a kind of extended solo jam session, with old style fiddle tunes, careening Gypsy music, and everything but the kitchen sink thrown in.

At one point, he lowers his instrument and strums it like a guitar while whistling a tune. Even some of the serious Polish musicians in black tie behind him on stage can't suppress a look of amazement.

The video has been watched almost 1 million times, earning cheers for its brilliance and audacity ("A freakin' genius!" reads one comment on YouTube) and boos from some for its supposed bad taste ("What a travesty!" writes another viewer). But the bigger question it raised for many was far more basic: Who is this guy?

Gilles Apap is an Algerian-born French violinist with a superb technique and a stellar classical pedigree. He was a protégé of the great violinist Yehudi Menuhin and was recognized in his 20s as a big-time classical talent. For a brief period in the 1990s, he was on the fast track toward a major career, with a powerful New York management agency behind him and a recording contract with Sony Classical.

But the life did not fit, and after a few years Apap walked away from it all, retreating first to Santa Barbara and then to the quiet of Arroyo Grande in Southern California. In the intervening years, he has taken his elite conservatory training and, in short, gone rogue.

Now 45, he is a classical violinist living off the grid, a staggeringly versatile player with a conviction that all music is created equal. He has immersed himself deeply in nonclassical traditions - Irish music, old-time fiddling, bluegrass, and Indian music - yet he hates the term "crossover," seeing it as a cynical marketing category. (He describes himself as "a classical violinist who enjoys playing sessions.") Whatever the label, there is no mistaking the sense of freedom and spontaneity he finds in these traditions - qualities he tries to channel back into his classical performance.

With his self-deprecating jokes and easygoing manner, Apap is far too laid back to be a missionary for any particular cause, and too sincere a musician to play the role of the industry jester or the hardened rebel. But he has joined the slender ranks of underground indie classical soloists, such as the cellist Matt Haimovitz, who are making careers by their own rules and starting to get results. Moreover, his wide-ranging musical travels and his sometimes hilariously whimsical approach make him a blast of fresh air in an intensely serious classical music world bent on a meticulous pursuit of the sublime.

Music was not always a source of so much joy for Apap. As a teenager in Nice, he had such a tortured relationship to his art that he once purposefully slammed his finger in a heavy door to get out of playing a concert and possibly end his days as a violinist. The gruesome stunt got him out of the concert, but his finger quickly healed and he kept playing, going on to win a prize at Menuhin's competition for his performance of Bartok's Second Violin Sonata. More important, he won the backing of that grand eminence of the violin.

Menuhin introduced Apap to the French director Bruno Monsaingeon, who made a documentary - "The Unknown Fiddler of Santa Barbara" (1993) - that won Apap an instant cult following. Other musicians he met along the way helped him deepen his interest in folk music.

These days, you might find him soloing with an orchestra one night and playing at a local square dance near his hometown the next. Most recently, Apap has been in Boston rehearsing for performances of the formidable and lushly dissonant Berg Violin Concerto with the Boston Philharmonic this weekend.

In person Apap exudes a relaxed, happy-go-lucky vibe, a combination of French cool and sun-baked California mellowness that seems to put other musicians around him at ease. "It's just what I do," he said over lunch. "I bring my violin and try to find the most natural way of making music."

On Monday Apap dropped by a string seminar at the Longy School in Cambridge. You could feel the room release its tension as he had the players sit in a big circle and use their singing voices - the original musical instrument - as a tool to help them access problems in their techniques. At one point Apap played a movement of solo Bach while at the same time singing an implied bass line. There was an effortlessness and simple beauty to it. Grins broke out at the unusual approach.

The next day Apap stopped by the Berklee College of Music to meet with a group of shaggy-haired students who had formed a crack bluegrass band. Most of them had never heard of Alban Berg, so Apap pulled out the opening bars of the concerto, drawing some squinting nods of respect for this strange exotic music. But he did not belabor the demonstration. Before long, instrument cases were shed and Apap was in the thick of a smoldering bluegrass jam session, seemingly relaxed as ever. "What do you guys want to play next?," he said.

Having stepped off the big-league soloist track almost a decade ago ("I just never felt comfortable with that life") Apap is still pretty much off the radar screen of the mainstream classical world. Boston Philharmonic conductor Benjamin Zander called him out of the blue after remembering the Monsaingeon documentary he had seen years earlier. "Some people look down their noses at him for jazzing up the Mozart concertos," Zander said by phone. "I think Mozart would have been absolutely amused and delighted. I think we all take ourselves much too seriously. It's wonderful to have Apap here."

Purists may never warm to his freewheeling, cross-pollinated approach, or to his encores that start with Bach and wander far, far afield (one may be in store this weekend). But Apap seems to have wisely given up on trying to please everyone. "I live a very simple life at home," he says. "I chop my own wood, take my shower outside. I take my fiddle and go out whenever the weather allows it."

Apap says he relishes opportunities to play folk music as a way of connecting with people he meets in his travels, and as a kind of release valve from all the intensity of his classical repertoire. He now has his own record label ("ApapAziz") and a band called "Colors of Invention" that treats classical music a bit like its own folk tradition. He practices by the beach and on the hiking trails near his home. He has jammed in the middle of London's Heathrow airport, and near the base camp of Everest at 18,000 feet.

It wasn't hard to see how this improbable Frenchman inspired the students he met with this week. His example seemed to say: There is a lot of musical wisdom to be found far beyond the conservatory walls, and beyond the classical canon. Just relax, strap on your fiddle - and go.

Jeremy Eichler can be reached at jeichler@globe.com.