A night of Moody music

Many miles separate Dover, Idaho, from Boston, and the living room where Jason Moody started playing violin from the stage of the New England Conservatory’s Jordan Hall. But Moody made the leap with ease.

Now he returns this weekend as the featured artist in the last of the Spokane Symphony’s “Spokane Homecoming” concerts this season at The Met.

Moody will be soloist in Mozart’s Violin Concerto No. 5 (nicknamed the “Turkish”) in programs Sunday and Tuesday that also will include Haydn’s Symphony No. 94 (the “Surprise”) and Stravinsky’s Suite from his ballet “Pulcinella.”

Eckart Preu, the symphony’s music director, will conduct.

Moody grew up in Dover, near Sandpoint, the youngest of three children of a veterinarian father and a mother who was a piano teacher.

“When I was about 3,” he recalls, “I would go to the Festival at Sandpoint with my parents and I was always fascinated by the the violinists, especially the concertmaster, Kelly Farris. And after the concert, I would always go to the side of the concert tent and get his autograph.

“So when my mom asked me if I wanted to study a musical instrument when I was in kindergarten, I told her I wanted to study the violin.”

Now 23 and a graduate student at Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music in Houston, Moody remembers beginning his violin study at Carolyn Hatch’s Fiddlers Hatchery in Sandpoint.

“There were a lot of good string players who came out of that little hatchery,” says Farris, who later became Moody’s teacher. “And Jason was one of the very best.”

In high school, Moody kept up a 4.0 grade-point average while immersing himself in his violin studies along with running on Sandpoint’s cross country team, backpacking, skiing, roller-blading and other activities teenagers enjoy.

Unlike most teenagers, though, Moody won music competitions including the Greater Spokane Music and Allied Arts Festival (now Musicfest Northwest).

One such competition took him to Boston, where he appeared on National Public Radio’s “From the Top,” a showcase for talented performers from all over the United States. Another brought Moody an appearance on Garrison Keillor’s popular public radio program, “A Prairie Home Companion.”

After finishing high school, Moody attended Seattle Pacific University where he studied with Kim Zabelle. He also studied with the University of Washington’s violin instructor, Ronald Patterson.

Moody’s current teacher is the Romanian-born virtuoso Sergiu Luca, whose skill, intellect and personality lead many colleagues and students to describe him as “slightly larger than life.”

Whatever the situation, Moody can handle it, says Farris.

“Jason is the kind of kid who just finds his own course,” he says. “It’s uncanny; Jason has the kind of personality who can take a barrage of criticism without ever getting defensive or a wounded ego. He can take the best of what works for him from any teacher, and what doesn’t work, he can just set aside.

“And as a musician, he has that rare combination of instinctual inner expressiveness and a very, very quick brain.”

Luca is putting him through the paces of the standard repertoire of violin concertos, sonatas, etudes and violin showpieces. But when he spoke in a telephone interview from his Houston apartment earlier this week, Moody seemed just as eager to talk about his experience in Rice’s symphony orchestra and his work with his graduate-school string quartet.

It’s a big change from Sandpoint, Moody says.

“When I got here last August,” he recalls, “Houston had weeks when the temperature was over 100, with matching humidity.

“But what I had the hardest time adjusting to is how flat the land is. I know there are places around here that are no more than 10 feet above sea level. And I really miss the mountains.”

Moody will pay a visit to North Idaho’s mountains for a few weeks this summer after played playing in the Spoleto USA Festival Orchestra in Charleston, S.C.

Then, following a stint at the Banff Centre Festival, he will return to scaling musical mountains in his second year of graduate study in Houston.