Stardom on both stage and screen is usually reserved for actors, but violinist Joshua Bell is continuing his efforts to be music’s king of all media. This year finds him making a new recording of perhaps the most passionate violin concerto of all time, dominating a movie soundtrack, and sneaking into a second career as a conductor. And all the while, he’s managing to remain the same unpretentious Josh Bell he was when he became a teen violin celebrity some 20 years ago.

Take his approach to—call it reverence for—the cadenza in the Tchaikovsky concerto. When Bell recorded the Beethoven and Mendelssohn concertos a couple of years ago, he boldly provided his own customized cadenzas. Not so when he remade the Tchaikovsky at the end of January with Michael Tilson Thomas and the Berlin Philharmonic (Bell first recorded that work in 1988). Bell is sticking with Tchaikovsky’s factory-installed cadenza. “I’m really in love with the concerto again,” he says. “I’m taking more risks and telling the story in a more defined way than I used to. But I haven’t had the nerve to write my own cadenza. Maybe next time I record it, 20 years from now.”

Bell had no problem playing new material in the score for Ladies in Lavender, a film starring Judi Dench and Maggie Smith that’s finally obtaining US distribution this year. “I wasn’t involved in this one at all until post-production,” he says. “I played a very beautiful original score by Nigel Hess, as well as some repertoire pieces by Sarasate and Paganini and Massenet.”

Bell may be physically invisible in the movie, but he’s a definite visual presence in his role as “artistic partner” with the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra. He spends several weeks each season playing concertos with the group as well as participating in other works from the concertmaster’s chair. “It’s the sort of thing I’m pushing to do more in my schedule,” he says. Next season, for example, he’ll try it with the San Francisco Symphony, too.

One of his St. Paul programs will include Beethoven’s Violin Concerto, Op. 61, on the first half, and Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7 on the second, without a conductor but with Bell guiding the performance as concertmaster. “Leading from that chair, one can indicate a lot,” he says. “This is definitely a stepping stone to getting up and really conducting.”