Violinist Elmar Oliveira will play the rarely heard violin concerto of Finnish composer Einojuhani Rautavaara Saturday night with the Rhode Island Philharmonic. “It’s very dramatic,” he says.

Laura Lewis

Elmar Oliveira agreed to appear with the Rhode Island Philharmonic this weekend on one condition: that he be allowed to play the rarely heard violin concerto of Finnish composer Einojuhani Rautavaara. Actually, he said he would play something else if the orchestra absolutely insisted.

But he just played the Rautavaara in Denver and with his schedule as busy as it is, the acclaimed violinist didn’t have much time to work up another concerto. Besides, he’s a big believer in the Rautavaara, which he recorded some years ago with the Helsinki Philharmonic. The disk won a Cannes award.

As it turned out, Philharmonic conductor Larry Rachleff was also interested in it.

“It’s a marvelous piece,” said Oliveira, who grew up in Naugatuck, Conn.

Oliveira said he came to know the two-movement concerto when a friend working for the Finnish record label Ondine recommended he be tapped to record it. He took a look at the score, listened to a tape and “fell in love with it.”

He traveled to Finland and subsequently recorded it with conductor Leif Segerstam.

“The first couple of years after I learned it there wasn’t a lot of interest in it. Then all of a sudden Cleveland, Chicago and all the big orchestra started being attracted to the piece.

“I’ve played it quite a bit. Not as much as Mendelssohn, Beethoven and Brahms, but that’s rare for contemporary music. But I’m pleased with the amount of performances I’ve done.”

Besides a Finnish violinist, he doesn’t know of anyone else playing the piece, which he described as a “logical extension” of the Sibelius violin concerto. It, in fact, opens like the Sibelius, said Oliveira, “cloudy and mysterious.”

“It’s sort of spiritual in its content,” he said. “The last movement is more dynamic. I would use the word virtuosic, but not in a showy way. It’s very dramatic.”

It is also “very audience-friendly.”

“There’s nothing in it that will irritate anyone,” he said.

Oliveira was speaking on his cell phone while driving home from teaching at a new conservatory in Boca Raton, Fla. He was recently hired by Lynn University to teach an elite group of scholarship students from around the world. The conservatory is modeled after the renowned Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, where students who are talented enough to make the grade go for free.

Oliveira lives most of the year outside New York in Croton-on-Hudson. He has taught in New York, but he said Lynn is “just more suited to what I was looking for with a real high-level class of violinist.”

Oliveira said his new teaching duties have forced him to cut back his concert schedule, but not by much. He still is playing somewhere in the world every week. He usually teaches in Florida every other week, where he has 10 students.

“In a sense, all I’ve done is add more travel to my life,” he said.

It turns out that Oliveira and his wife, violist Sandra Robbins, have had a condominium in Florida, about an hour from Lynn, for about 25 years. But they didn’t use it much. Now they are based in Florida for most of the winter. Robbins is principal violist with a chamber orchestra in the area.

This is something like the fifth time Oliveira, 57, has appeared with the Philharmonic in the past two decades. He was last here in 2004 for a super-fast account of the Tchaikovsky Concerto.

He was born to Portuguese immigrants outside of Hartford. His father, a factory worker who built houses at night, loved the violin but could do little more than pick out tunes. It was his late brother John who gave him his first lessons at the age of 9.

He went on to become the only American ever to win the top violin prize in Moscow’s famed Tchaikovsky Competition.

Oliveira said he is constantly trying to refine his technique. But when asked if playing got any easier, he said it is always a mater of “dedication and commitment.”

“For those who say it gets easier,” he said, “I’d be very wary.”

As if life weren’t busy enough, Oliveira also runs his own record company, the Artek label, which is about to issue a complete cycle of the Mahler Symphonies with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic and conductor Gerard Schwarz. He has just put out his own recording of the Beethoven and Mendelssohn concertos and is about to release the Bloch and Benjamin Lees concerto, which hasn’t been done since Henryk Szeryng recorded it with the Boston Symphony and Erich Leinsdorf.

“I became disillusioned with a lot of things about the record companies I had worked with in the past, and there were many. It had a lot to do with choice of repertoire and the fact that if you record something it might only stay in the catalog for two or three years before being deleted. It was about not having any input in the recording process, such as editing, marketing and so many other things that go into a recording.

“I just said, I think it’s time to try something different, and this has been incredibly successful.”

That does not mean profitable, though. Oliveira said whatever money is made is put back into the company.

With the record company, teaching and performing, Oliveira has a full life.

“I get about three hours sleep a night,” he said.

But he has not lost his hunger for music.

“It’s like breathing,” said Oliveira. “If I stopped playing the violin, it would be like I stopped breathing.”

Elmar Oliveira plays the Rautavaara violin concerto with the Rhode Island Philharmonic Saturday night at 8 at Veterans Memorial Auditorium. The program also features Dvorak’s Carnival Overture and Rachmaninoff’s Symphony No. 2. Tickets are $27-$65. Call (401) 248-7000 or log onto www.riphil.org.

Oliveira can also be heard tomorrow night at 5:30 during an open rehearsal at Veterans Auditorium. Tickets are $27 for adults, $12 students.

cgray@projo.com