In a memory that sounds like a variation of a scene from “A Chorus Line,” Danbi Um first picked up a violin when she was about 2 ½ years old while sitting through her older brother’s lessons.

Unlike the Broadway dancer in that hit musical, it would take her years before she actually enjoyed playing until a special teacher helped her connect with the instrument, leading her on a career of chamber ensemble performances that include three to close this year’s La Musica International Chamber Music Festival in Sarasota.

“My older brother used to play the violin and I would tag along to his lessons because we didn’t have a sitter,” the violinist recalled in a telephone interview. The teacher told her parents that she had some kind of intuition for the instrument. The teacher said, 'Let’s have her play for about a month or so and see what comes out.' That month lasted 30 years. My parents say I chose it, that I had an inkling toward it.”

While her brother quit, Um, kept at it. As she grew older and “was aware of what I was doing, I wasn’t very fond of it. It was something I felt I had to do.”

By this point, her family had moved from South Korea to the United States and at 10, Um was already a student at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. That was where she first met legendary violinist Joseph Silverstein, who provided the young musician with a new sense of inspiration.

Silverstein, a longtime faculty member of the Sarasota Music Festival before his death in 2015, “had the kind of sound I had never heard before, like the old Hollywood music sound, the last golden age of violin playing, very sizzling, sensuous. An amazing sound,” she said. It was the kind of sound Um “could emotionally connect to. He introduced me to playing the great artists and I became obsessed. I started to love it. It was something emotional and very direct. To this day I have a love and hate relationship with it. When you cannot do what you aspire to do musically, it can be depressing. But you also know that the music we are fortunate to play and serve is timeless music, beyond what is popular.”

Um is looking forward to making her Sarasota and La Musica debut as part of an ensemble of eight musicians who will be heard in three concerts at the Sarasota Opera House April 10, 13 and 16.

She will be joining artistic director and pianist Wu Han, violinists Julian Rhee and James Thompson, violist Paul Neubauer, cellists Nicholas Canellakis and David Finckel and pianist Michael Stephen Brown.”

She has worked with most of the musicians before but not necessarily together.

“What’s really incredible about Wu Han is she really has an eye for pairing musicians together in the repertoire that highlight their artistry the best,” Um said. “And matching players whose playing styles are very similar where you can feed off each other musically.”

Over the three concerts the ensemble will be performing works by Haydn, Mendelssohn, Brahms, Mozart, Kodaly, Arensky, Dvorak, Foss, Smetana and Schumann.

Um’s appearance comes just a few months after the release of her first album, “Much Ado,” on the AVIE record label.

“These are pieces that accompanied me during my formative years of playing. They’re not often played or recorded, but I grew up being very familiar with them,” she said referring to works by such composers as Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Ernest Bloch, Fritz Kreisler and Joseph Achron among others.

She describes some of it as ethnic music that her teachers played. “It seems the music that I was obsessed about and also happened to play, was from these regions. I also lived in Israel for about two years and I had got myself very familiar with some of the Jewish composers when I was studying there.”