One might question the wisdom of making a transatlantic flight just for a single recital in Philadelphia. It's not as if she has nothing else to do - when not playing concerts, she's taking her Guadagnini violin to prisons and factories in numerous outreach endeavors, and, as a 46-year-old divorced mother, is raising two daughters.
Nonetheless, Little seems quite unstoppable.
"It's a big year for Delius , and I want to play in Philadelphia again," she said. "It's definitely worth it."
She was last here in a 2003 tour stop with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra under Simon Rattle, playing the dense, modernistic Gyorgy Ligeti Violin Concerto. That music - along with the Wolfgang Rihm piece she recently performed in Amsterdam - couldn't be further from Delius, or so it seems. But the alternative logic she learned from close study of Delius - whose works such as "A Song Before Sunrise" have him pigeonholed as a British version of Debussy - put her in a place where she can apprehend pieces that depart from conventional thinking right down to their foundations.
Indeed, the composer taught her to look beyond musical surfaces, whether thorny (like Ligeti) or sparkling (like Delius).
"It's so hard to pinpoint his style, yet it's so definitely Delius," she said during a November interview at her home in the Ealing Common district of London. "You have to spend a really long time getting to know his musical personality." And the composer's hidden sex life is, for her, a key part of that. No wonder she's been controversial in Delius circles.
