Virtuoso Joshua Bell sings through his fiddle

NEW YORK (AP) – As the syncopated notes waver during the 2½-minute aria “In trutina,” a soprano sings: “My vacillating mind is like a seesaw – I resist love, but surely I will submit to it at last.”

On the new CD “Voice of the Violin,” the sentiment is expressed – without words – by the golden tone of Joshua Bell’s 1713 Stadivarius.

“Voice of the Violin” is a sequel to Bell’s hit 2003 album “Romance of the Violin,” a collection of short pieces that remained in Billboard’s top 10 on the traditional classical chart for nearly a year and has sold nearly 190,000 copies.

Like “Romance,” “Voice” has what it takes to reach beyond the classical music audience.

The 15 gems of the vocal repertoire are no longer than six minutes each, and all have lovely melodies and lush orchestrations artfully played by Bell and the Orchestra of St. Luke’s under conductor Michael Stern. And as a bonus, he’s joined by the hot soprano Anna Netrebko in the final piece, Richard Strauss’ “Morgen!”

But don’t call the virtuoso violinist a crossover artist. His “Voice” is firmly planted in classical music. It’s the audience that will cross over to his realm.

In a recent conversation with The Associated Press, Bell talked about finding his “Voice of the Violin.”

AP: The CD is unusual because the violin is playing music largely written for voice. Only two of the songs have singers.

JB: That was the whole idea of it. For ‘Romance of the Violin,’ I really wanted to do new arrangements of things that hadn’t been done on the instrument. … Most of them were completely new. A few of those were opera arias. … I particularly liked how those arias worked, and I thought, ‘Why not make a kind of spinoff, … everything relating to the voice? … So when I was thinking of the repertoire … I decided to do some pieces that were already arranged for violin and had been done before, like Rachmaninoff ‘Vocalise,’ ‘Ave Maria.’ … But the rest, many of these pieces I didn’t know before I started thinking of the album. I really scoured through lots of arias.

Like ‘In trutina?’

It’s pretty unusual, that one. It’s hardly a piece. It’s a very small little thing. It’s like a sorbet between courses that I was thinking of putting in. It’s like a little fragment. But I thought it was beautiful.

Whom were you trying to reach?

I was trying to reach the same audience that bought ‘Romance of the Violin,’ which turned out to be a nice size audience for a classical recording. … It somehow struck a chord with a certain type of audience. … Judging by the e-mails that I get to my Web site, … ‘Romance of the Violin’ was for a lot of them a gateway into my stuff, and also for a lot of them into classical music. … And these sort of arrangements seem to reach the kind of fringe audience that … likes classical music but doesn’t know what to buy and is kind of scared to delve into it.

AP: Because the songs are short, they’re appealing to a new audience. You don’t have to sit through 2½ hours of Dvorak’s opera “Rusalka” to hear ‘Song to the Moon.’

JB: That’s right. A lot of people have done short-piece records. What I have done … was just do an album with all slow (pieces) and just melodies. Usually violinists do virtuoso, flashy stuff, which is great.

AP: Why did you end a largely wordless collection of songs with Netrebko singing “Morgen”?

JB: When I was making this album, one of the things I had in the back of my head was the Strauss piece, which was written … with the violin obbligato. So I had this idea that I could put it at the end of this album – a final homage to the voice – put the violin and the voice together.

AP: It sums up the album.

JB: Yeah. I thought the whole album was about the voice and why not show the real thing at the end with the violin? … It turned out (Netrebko) happened to be at the Met singing that week while I had recordings. So it was fortuitous that she was there and agreed to do it on one of her off days. … We ran through it once and then she came for about 45 minutes to the studio and rushed in and rushed out. I enjoyed it. She’s got a beautiful voice and she was very un-divalike. … I’m hoping we’ll find some other opportunities to work together.