Violinist Tetzlaff: No Labels, Please : Today, Calendar debuts this weekly feature designed to introduce artists, performers and players whose stars are on the rise.

German violinist Christian Tetzlaff, 26, is fast becoming known--in the United States at least--as an exponent of 20th-Century music. He made his American debut in Cleveland in 1988 with the fiendishly difficult Schoenberg Concerto, and this week he joins Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Los Angeles Philharmonic in the Berg Concerto.

Yet Tetzlaff, currently in the midst of a Beethoven sonatas cycle in Germany, is quick to disavow “any labels on music making.”

“Starting out with the Schoenberg, which is not so often played, was a good thing for me and it got a lot of attention,” says Tetzlaff, who performed the work recently with the Philadelphia Orchestra. “But these days it’s a problem in the States. I’m asked to play Schoenberg or Berg or Stravinsky over and over. I feel just as much at home doing the Brahms. I did it in Stockholm together with Salonen and the Swedish Radio Symphony and requested to do it in Los Angeles, but the orchestra felt Berg would be better. This happens all the time.” (Tetzlaff also plays the Berg next week with the Boston Symphony.)

As further evidence of his immersion in “mainstream music,” Tetzlaff cites his ongoing performances both in Europe and the United States of the Brahms Double Concerto with Yo-Yo Ma.

Tetzlaff, who has appeared twice at Marlboro in Vermont, spends summers playing at chamber music festivals in Finland and Austria with his wife, a clarinetist with the Frankfurt Opera.

The father of 1-year-old Lenny, Tetzlaff refuses to be away from his Frankfurt home for more than two weeks at a time. “If you’re away from a small child for too long you miss too much,” he says. “I have other things in my life now besides music, and all I want to do is spend my spare time with my wife.”

But then Tetzlaff has always been blessed with a rich family life.

The child of amateur singers, Tetzlaff grew up in a home in Hamburg filled with music. After being taught the violin by two “neighborhood ladies,” he began serious study at age 14 with local pedagogue Uwe-Martin Haiberg, who encouraged his young charge to play chamber music--and scales--and recommended he study with Walter Levine, who was first violinist of the LaSalle Quartet, at the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music.

“It was an important year for me,” Tetzlaff recalls. “I had no connection to the city, but the important part for me was to be disconnected from everything I had known before. It was a year of liberation; I had to do my own things now.”

But, above all, Tetzlaff attributes his steady artistic growth to a balanced childhood and a nurturing environment created by his parents who did not push their children but nevertheless took a keen interest in their musical curiosities.

The result: Tetzlaff’s eldest brother is now conductor of the Staatstheater in Darmstadt, one sister is principal flutist with the Hamburg Symphony and another studies cello with Heinrich Schiff in Salzburg. Then there’s Christian, who, despite playing about 80 concerts each year, still regards himself as a “developing” artist.

“I know it’s stupid for me to say, but I feel I have just started out,” says Tetzlaff, who has recorded for Virgin Classics all three Haydn Concerti and the Bartok Second, and recently entered the studios in Prague to record the Dvorak Concerto and Lalo’s “Symphonie Espagnole” with the Czech Philharmonic.

“Playing concerts is getting to be more fun for me when it wasn’t always so,” he says. “The act of doing it is now deep fulfillment. As a result, I look forward to many more years of playing.”