Award-winning violinist Lucia Micarelli is hard to categorize, considering she’s found success as an actress, singer, and composer as well. Her latest project, ROOTS, explores diverse genres, blending them into an engaging musical experience without boundaries. She’ll bring this new show, based on a current album in progress, to San Francisco’s Presidio Theatre on Feb. 21 and Santa Monica’s BroadStage on Feb. 22. Accompanying Micarelli will be Nathan Farrington on bass and her husband Eric Byers on cello.
Born in Queens, New York, to a Korean American mother and Italian American father, Micarelli began violin lessons at age 3. Just a few years later, after the family moved to Hawaii, she debuted as a soloist with the Honolulu Symphony. She attended The Juilliard School’s pre-college division, where she studied with famed pedagogue Dorothy DeLay, with summers spent at the Aspen Music Festival, where she performed regularly with the orchestra.
Around the age of 18, she started branching out from classical music, exploring and performing many other genres — Appalachian fiddling, bluegrass, Americana, jazz, and rock — which led to touring gigs with the boundary-pushing Trans-Siberian Orchestra and then with rock band Jethro Tull, vocalist Josh Groban, and trumpeter Chris Botti.
In 2009, Micarelli got a call to act in HBO’s critically acclaimed series Treme as Annie Talarico, a young street musician navigating the challenges of post-Katrina New Orleans. That’s when she started singing. Since that time, she has recorded five albums, starred in her own PBS special in 2018, and collaborated with musicians including Barbra Streisand, Lang Lang, and Andrea Bocelli — the last at the 2024 Academy Awards. In addition, Micarelli recently wrote the score for the HBO documentary Murder in Boston.
She currently lives in Los Angeles with her husband and their two young children.
You started playing violin at a very young age and were quite successful from the start. Was anyone else in your family musical?
No, but my mother really wanted me to play an instrument. She herself had always wished she could play the piano. So when I was 3, she took me to the local Suzuki School and asked if I could start piano lessons. They apparently told her my hands were too small to start then and I should come back in a year. But she was impatient and asked what I could start right away: alas, the violin. I am grateful to my mom for being so determined. She practiced violin every day with me from the age of 3 until I left home at 17 to go to conservatory.
Was there a particular experience that convinced you to pursue a career as a musician?
I was telling people, ‘I’m going to be a violinist when I grow up!’ from around the time I was in kindergarten. I honestly never thought about or even tried to pursue anything else. It was only much later that I discovered other interests.
What has working as an actress been like? Has that experience impacted your musical career in any way?
Treme was my first experience acting, and it was such a profound gift. It was an amazing opportunity to explore another side of storytelling. We were in New Orleans, one of the most interesting, cultured, diverse, and wild cities ever, where music feels like such a part of everyday life and human interaction, and that was so beautiful to me.
It definitely impacted my musical career in that I learned so many styles of music from so many brilliant musicians. Every episode of that show was not only an acting lesson for me but a music lesson, and I came out of those four seasons with such a deeper understanding of not only many more genres of music but also how music is so tied to culture, human experience, tradition, community, and storytelling.
Tell me about the inspiration for ROOTS.
At first, I thought I was going to be doing a musicology experiment and trying to find the roots of American music that I like and following those threads back. I was originally going to call my album ROOTS. But then as I started digging, I found that so much of [this music] is European-based and that [European] folk music is the basis of a lot of classical music, so I changed the title of the album to Anthropology. It’s about exploring us as a human collective, which ends up becoming a universal story. Almost everything has a folk-music feel, but it is still mixed-genre. There’s a good amount of classical stuff, a little bit of jazz, different types of fiddle and traditional music, and bluegrass. The majority of the show is from my new album — with some of my older stuff as well.
When you stand back and look at all these expressions of human emotion in totally different genres at totally different times by totally different cultures, it feels like it’s all [about] the same things: the same pains, the same joys, and the same emotions that are so universal.
What made you decide to branch out from classical music when you were young?
I have always been really drawn to folk music and all of the fiddling and the bluegrass stuff. This kind of music seems to come directly from human experience, and it’s so universally emotionally present, as opposed to classical or jazz, which are more intellectual.
What do you like about doing mixed-genre shows?
There are all these barriers around classical music, and it is really my passion to break them. I think that boundaries shouldn’t really exist. The whole reason I present these shows the way that I do is because I think that the root of all music is emotional and the essential thing is whether or not people connect to it, [regardless] whether it was written by J.S. Bach or Tom Waits.
How did your job composing for Murder in Boston come about?
Jason Hehir, the fantastic director, reached out to me. He was familiar with my music over the years and asked if I would ever be interested in scoring, and of course I was. My husband and I worked together on that score, in addition to Tom Caffey, another film composer whom Jason regularly works with. It was a wonderful experience, and we look forward to doing more film scoring in the future.
Do you have plans to branch out in any other ways?
Yes, I have more composing work coming up and am always on the lookout for acting projects that are interesting to me. And I have a long list of albums I’m itching to make in between. I love music and storytelling, and I feel those are my callings, so I’m always creating in those realms. It just makes me happy.
Is it difficult to manage family life and career?
It really does take a village. [My husband and I] are lucky to have amazing family and friends to help with the juggle. But my personal and professional lives are very much enmeshed. The babies are very used to hanging out with us while practicing and rehearsing. They’re well traveled and by all accounts our cutest and least productive stagehands.
