By Shirley Fleming

Jimmy Lin (Cho-Liang Lin on concert programs, but answering to his American nickname everywhere else) bounds up the steps of a New York restaurant on a hot summer day and apologizes for being a few minutes late. He'd been sleeping for eleven hours, he said, after returning from a tour of Asia and stopping off in Oregon for a concert on the way home-allowing a total of four hours' sleep en route. He is wide awake now, and radiates a kind of athletic health and good humor. Asian tours are, after all, a steady part of his life; he has made more than a dozen of them since he graduated from Juilliard in 1981.

Lin's Asian connection, of course, is bred in the blood, and even now the ties are tightening. As Taiwan's premier native-born violinist, he has always had high visibility in his home country, where he won his first competition at the age of 11. Although he left Taiwan at 12 and eventually became an American citizen, it was natural, for instance, that he be invited to Taipei to play at the presidential inauguration four years ago.

But Jimmy's relationship with Taiwan has not always been a smooth one. In 1984, while he was still a Taiwanese citizen, the government suddenly cancelled permission for him to go to Hong Kong for solo appearances with the New York Philharmonic. The ban was lifted at the last minute, but the affair was, in Jimmy's unmincing words, "a big stink. I was so angry that I didn't go back to Taiwan for five years." All that is long behind him now, and he is riding the crest of the extremely successful Taipei Chamber Music Festival, which he founded at the president's invitation in 1997, and which will have its second installment in May 2000. It is a labor of love and an indication of Lin's still-deep feeling for his homeland. The event was a roaring success, and any doubts as to whether it could be established on a regular basis were blown away by the cheers of 30,000 people who gathered outside the concert hall to watch the closing performance on giant TV screens.

But Jimmy Lin as entrepreneur is hardly the point. It is as a remarkably sweet-toned and persuasive violinist that he has been recognized for 20-odd years-since he was 17, in fact, when he won the Juilliard Violin Competition and the Queen Sofia International Violin Competition in Madrid. Since that heady year he has maintained a high-speed concert life, playing with every major orchestra and under the world's most distinguished conductors, all the while managing to stay involved in chamber music, which is close to his heart.

Typically, his performances prompt such critical comments as "The purity of his sound and the seemingly effortless command of technique and details elevated his performance" . . . "Lin is one of the best violinists playing today" . . . "Lin prizes beauty, nuance, color, and flexibility of tone."

If you ask Jimmy Lin to trace the origin of this sensitive and beautifully nuanced playing, he will lay the accomplishment at the feet of Juilliard's Dorothy DeLay. She accepted him as a pupil when he arrived in New York at 15, fresh from a three-year stint in Australia, where he lived with an uncle and studied at Sydney's Conservatorium of Music. He learned of DeLay through Itzhak Perlman, who gave a master class in Sydney, and was fired with the determination to study with her. His mother packed him off to New York, and a pair of generous benefactors took him into their family.

"Miss DeLay concentrates on a really good tone-for the whole first year we were working on my sound," he remembered during our midsummer lunch. "But she gave me a lot of interpretive leeway, and she never inhibited my musical curiosity." That curiosity has never left him, and in the years since, Lin has played the world premieres of 10 concertos; the one that makes his eyes light up is Christopher Rouse's, which he premiered at Aspen in 1992. He recalls with delight that when he played it later at Tanglewood, his old friend Yo-Yo Ma heard it and was so taken with it that he immediately chose Rouse to write a cello concerto. "It's wonderful when something blossoms like that," Jimmy beams. "It doesn't just die. I feel that my effort is rewarded."

The Lin discography at the moment stands at just under 20 CDs, most of them on Sony Classical, spanning a repertory from Haydn and Mozart to Prokofiev and Aaron Jay Kernis. They continue to garner comments on his "brilliance, warmth, and sense of genuine enthusiasm," and Jimmy is perfectly willing to tell you how he sets out to achieve the qualities that listeners find so attractive in his playing.

"What I aim for is proportion, structure, and tonal beauty. I'm not the type to go out and play temperamentally, by intuition, though I keep as much spontaneity as I can. But clarity of thought, clarity of intention, having a clear ground plan are important to me. When I study a piece for the first time, I grab on to the architecture before I even think about bowing and fingering."

"I have periods of self-doubt. Am I playing coherently? Or are these just notes strung together? It's terrible. I always try for new rhythmic verve, but when I run out of musical priorities, then I get uneasy about myself. I remedy that by talking to other musicians, or going to concerts, or listening to a recording by a great master." He cites Oistrakh and Kreisler among the violinists whose sound he most admires.

Warming to his subject, Jimmy Lin continues: "I am almost 40, and life experiences have an affect on how you play. Falling in love, reading a book-you can translate these into a powerful musical statement. For instance, at Santa Fe last summer I was performing the Tchaikovsky Piano Trio with Jon Kimura Parker and Peter Wiley. The Trio builds up to a tremendous, tragic climax. I had been reading Jon Krakauer's book Into Thin Air, about the ascent of Mt. Everest when members of his party were lost in a storm. The Tchaikovsky, in that final section, was speaking to me in such a powerful way about the dimensions of tragedy that I almost broke down in tears. Visually, I could see those men in the snow freezing to death. It's not that that kind of thing makes you play better, but it makes you think a little deeper."

Whatever the gravity of Lin's thoughts, he remains an inescapably happy and optimistic man. His quick smile can light up a room, and his sunny disposition even affected his choice of violins. When he traded in his Strad for a Guarneri del Gesù, he chose one of that master's earlier instruments. "The later del Gesù violins have a darker tone; mine, 1734, is supposed to have a more soprano sound, though it is dark enough for me. I don't think the darkest instruments are part of my personality."

When he is not traveling, Jimmy Lin teaches with great enthusiasm at Juilliard and shares an upper West Side apartment with his wife of four years, Dr. Deborah Ho Lin, a pediatrician. His membership in the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Musical America's 1999 Ensemble of the Year, makes him a familiar face in New York's concert life. Lin looks forward to the Taiwan festival and hopes eventually to take it to mainland China, but he is aware of the strained relations between the two countries. He remains, typically, undismayed. "Things are getting better now; they're not nearly as bad as in 1996. The whole area is growing," says Jimmy, "and I can't sit still on just one thing."

Shirley Fleming covers music for the New York Post and is classical music editor of the American Record Guide.