Violinist has celeb fans

NEW YORK -

Sean Connery,

Angela Bassett,

Gabriel Byrne,

Billy Joel,

Roger Moore,

Gerard Depardieu and

John Malkovich are all fans of the special sounds made by Julian Rachlin.

But it's not just the violinist's music that's getting him attention.

Named a Young Global Leader this year by the

World Economic Forum, he aims to bring people together on every continent — even in warring lands.

"Music is an instrument of peace," he says. "It is also powerful — a powerful weapon in a world of violence."

With a new CD, the 32-year-old Lithuanian-born musician is touring England, the United States, Norway, Spain and Austria through June.

For his May 24-26 concerts with the New York Philharmonic, he programmed Camille Saint-Saens' Concerto No. 3 for violin and orchestra. Recently, for fun, he played the work in a piano bar in Vienna, Austria.

Saint-Saens also wrote the music Rachlin is performing in June at a restored medieval monastery in Pernegg, Austria — "Carnival of the Animals," with narration by Moore, the former James Bond.

Moore, 79, calls Rachlin "an extraordinary talent, a virtuoso, a genius."

Another ex-James Bond, Connery, owned a recording of Rachlin playing a violin concerto by the Finnish composer Jan Sibelius long before he met his now friend.

Rachlin says he has "a need" to link his music-making to real, daily life. In New York, he planned to meet children for an after-school session of music and talk.

"I've never wanted to be just a violinist, making money and being famous," says Rachlin, who plays about 20 free concerts each year — out of about 120 — to benefit efforts for cancer,

AIDS, the environment, wildlife. "My contribution to the world is tiny, but if we all do something, it makes a big difference."

Rachlin has brought healing sounds to

Israel, amid conflicts with Arab lands.

In the former Yugoslavia, which was decimated by civil war, Rachlin played in Dubrovnik while others were abandoning the beautiful seaside city where they were to appear at its famed summer festival.

"Everybody was canceling. But I decided to be a pioneer — to revive the cultural activity," says Rachlin, who started a weeklong concert series in Dubrovnik that bears his name. One concert at the Julian Rachlin & Friends festival this September is set in a Dubrovnik church, as a benefit for a local orphanage. Another evening features selections from Joel's "Fantasies and Delusions" for piano. (When Rachlin made his Carnegie Hall debut two years ago, the Piano Man showed up backstage.)

His playing is both strong and subtle, with a crystal clear, warm tone that exudes intimacy. He plays with ease, relying on what The New York Times called a "high-octane technique."

While he lives in Vienna, he feels at home pretty much anywhere, after years of globe-trotting and a childhood as the son of Jewish musicians who left Soviet-controlled Lithuania when he was 3 because of anti-Semitism. The family was granted immigrant status in Austria as part of a U.S. agreement with the Soviets, who were promised shipments of American grain in exchange for allowing Soviet Jews to emigrate.

Rachlin says Austria is hardly free of anti-Semitism, and that the Holocaust remains "a taboo" subject to many in Hitler's homeland. Still, he says his family has never personally encountered anti-Semitism in Vienna, which he calls "a special place" for its deep cultural tradition.

He plays a 1741 instrument made in Cremona, Italy, by Guarneri del Gesu — on loan to him courtesy of the Austrian National Bank.

Earlier this year, Rachlin faced the prospect of his career suddenly ending, because of a cyst on the middle finger of his left hand that threatened to lock a joint. But the delicate surgery that kept him from performing for three months went perfectly, and he's back on track.

It wasn't the first hurdle in his two-decade career, which started when he was a 13-year-old performing with conductor Lorin Maazel in Berlin. He soon signed a recording contract with Sony. "But the crisis is inevitable, because when you're 13, everything comes subconsciously," he says. "And when you get into puberty, you start feeling uncomfortable, insecure, you start asking yourself all these questions. It was too much pressure and I didn't know how to handle it."

The Sony contract dried up when he was still a teenager and, Rachlin says, he "escaped to New York, where I was nobody, and nobody expected anything. I was just a student" — of violinist Pinchas Zukerman, who also plays the larger, rich-toned viola and inspired Rachlin to do the same.

Back in New York, Rachlin will now again play under Maazel's baton.

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On the Net:

http://www.julianrachlin.com