Alban Berg died in 1935, after contracting blood poisoning from an infected insect bite or sting. But the Austrian composer was very much present when Karen Gomyo was learning his Violin Concerto, and not only in the music on the page.

“What’s interesting is that I live in an apartment in New York that basically used to be the place where the Beaux Arts Trio used to rehearse,” Gomyo tells the Straight from California, where she’s playing Benjamin Britten’s Violin Concerto with the Sacramento Philharmonic. “The violinist Isidore Cohen used to live there, and his son has kept the apartment.…It’s a huge place, so there are always musicians coming in and out, and while I was learning the Berg concerto there was a group that came and rehearsed in the music room. They were rehearsing Berg’s Lyric Suite, and so the house was full of Berg for a few weeks.”

The Lyric Suite was written for string quartet, while the Violin Concerto, of course, calls for an ensemble like the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, which will join Gomyo for her upcoming local performances. But the title of the smaller work contains a clue to the nature of the larger: it is not entirely the kind of austere, mathematically inspired music commonly associated with Berg, Arnold Schoenberg, and Anton Webern, the principal members of the highly intellectual and formally inventive Second Viennese School.

“You’re not going to walk out of a performance of the Berg concerto and be humming a melody from the piece,” Gomyo concedes. “It’s not that kind of writing.” Yet a case can be made that the work owes as much to the late Romantic period in music as it does to echt modernism. Although created using serial techniques—based around the notion that all 12 notes of the chromatic scale must be deployed in a predetermined sequence or “tone row”, thus loosening the hold of conventional harmony on the music—the Violin Concerto also includes passages that are reminiscent of Gustav Mahler’s symphonic writing. And, significantly, its final movement explicitly quotes a Johann Sebastian Bach chorale, Es ist genug (It Is Enough).

“It’s an extremely complex work,” Gomyo observes. Embedded in the score, she explains, are all kinds of cryptic notes and asides, from an allusion to a Carinthian folk tune to structures that reflect Berg’s interest in numerology. It’s certainly music that repays deep analysis, but what really strikes the violinist is that it is also an extremely emotional piece—which is natural enough, given that it was dedicated to the memory of Manon Gropius, daughter of Mahler’s widow Alma and Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius, who was struck down by polio at the age of 18.

“For me, it started to make a lot of sense when I realized how much there was behind this music,” says Gomyo. “This is really expressionist music, in the sense that it’s about acting out the human emotional and psychological journey.

“I think it’s extremely passionate and emotional—and very sensual as well. Even seductive, I would say,” the violinist continues. “Its depth is enormous, so I think it’s one of those works where, over the years, I’m just going to keep discovering new things.”

Karen Gomyo joins the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra at the Orpheum on Saturday and Monday (October 15 and 17).