Not many young people get the opportunity to audition a career choice to see if it's really what they want to do. For many, the path to a profession starts with the "now what?" of college graduation and a few false starts before things settle down.

For cellist Julie Albers, the opportunity to try on a music career came at age 16 when she went away to the Cleveland Institute of Music. To that point, she knew music would always be present in her life, but would it go further than that?

"For me, it wasn't such an obvious thing," Albers said from San Francisco, where she had been rehearsing for a national tour with the Albers Trio chamber ensemble.

Her entrance into the institute's high school program was meant to pull back the curtain and reveal the commitments necessary to play classical music professionally.

"If I loved it, then I would stay and continue and go that route," Albers said. "And if I didn't, then I would come home, finish high school and do something else."

That opportunity more than a decade ago brings her to town today as the soloist in performances of Elgar's Concerto for Cello and Orchestra in E Minor with the Stockton Symphony. The program opens with Sibelius' "Finlandia" and also includes Beethoven's Symphony No. 5. Peter Jaffe conducts.

Albers, who most recently performed in Stockton in 2004 in the quartet called CELLO, has lived with Elgar's piece since she was 14 and continues to find something new in it.

"That's the beauty of being a musician," she said. "No two performances are ever the same. I always notice little details or try things differently."

Completed in 1919 after the end of World War I, Elgar's work has become one of the most highly regarded pieces in the cello repertoire. The concerto is notable for the way Elgar lets the cello sing in its most expressive registers.

"That's what the cello does best," Albers said. "It sings so beautifully, and the entire first and third movements are just all about the sound, the range."

It's that vocal quality that remains the concerto's most prominent feature, especially in the years since Jacqueline du Pré made her famous recording in 1965.

"She was one of the first great proponents of that piece," Jaffe said. "She did make it kind of sing in a way."

Born into a musical family that includes two Juilliard-trained sisters, Albers has performed with orchestras across the country as well as in Europe, South Korea, Taiwan and New Zealand. In 2003, she was named the first gold medal laureate of South Korea's Gyeongnam International Music Competition, winning the $25,000 grand prize.

Albers' travels have allowed her to bring music to a wide range of audiences, and they also have inspired her to help build the classical audience. Albers said she is continually drawn to the simple pleasure of young children's first encounters with a real, live instrument.

"If I go into a school, a lot of times the kids have never seen a cello," she said. "They're really excited to see it in person, and if it's presented in a way that seems exciting, then I think you'll start developing an audience."

But building audiences is a task that runs up against larger cultural walls, especially in the United States, where classical music often is taken as elitist and stuffy, reserved only for formal occasions.

This is unlike Albers' experience in Europe where, she said, "You walk around, say, Dresden, and in every church on a Monday afternoon, there's some sort of concert going on for some sort of audience. It's a less formal thing."

What makes it all work is the idea of communication.

"It's something that any person can have a common understanding and love of," she said. "I feel that music, in general, has those possibilities."

Contact Glenn Pillsbury at features@recordnet.com.

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Rare chance to hear the fifth

Few pieces of classical music are able to stand as "the" anything. Yet, mention to any music fan that you're attending this weekend's performances of "the Fifth," and you'll be instantly understood as talking about Beethoven's Symphony No. 5.

So it could hardly be more ironic that these concerts are actually a rare chance to hear the complete work, which is marking its 200th anniversary this year.

For decades, up through the 1950s and '60s, orchestras programmed the piece heavily. Since then, Stockton Symphony conductor Peter Jaffe said, "the pendulum has swung completely the other way. Now you only hear it in commercials for toothpaste or deodorant or whatever."

Nevertheless, with its signature opening motto, a four-note figure that pops up throughout the work, the symphony has inspired composer after composer toward ever-loftier heights of dramatic interpretation.

"That theme is instantly recognizable," Jaffe said, "even for people who don't know anything about classical music."

The BBC got into the act during World War II, using the motto as a Morse code "V" for "victory" (short-short-short-long) to introduce its hourly news broadcasts, thus claiming the symphony as an emblem of freedom against the armies of Nazi tyranny. And let's not forget "A Fifth of Beethoven," Walter Murphy's disco rendition from the mid-1970s.

"It's not just the fact that it's an impressive piece," noted Nicolas Waldvogel, director of the orchestra at University of the Pacific's Conservatory of Music. "A lot of critical thinking about music and about the arts changed radically right after the premiere of the Fifth.

"It's a really big deal in that way," he added.

Indeed, we continue to return to the Fifth because of how it invites such noble ideals and for the way the symphony evokes, as Jaffe describes it, a "sense of grand human adventure."

-- Glenn Pillsbury