It's one thing to play softly, but there is an art to projecting the feeling of intimacy out to a concert hall. This is one of the concepts that violinist Donald Weilerstein discussed on the third day of the Starling-DeLay Symposium on Violin Studies. Weilerstein earned his bachelor's and master's degrees at Juilliard in the 1960s, played for 20 years in the Cleveland Quartet and has served on the Juilliard faculty since 2000. He also talked about posture and sound production, offering concepts of balance and energy grounded in practices such as tai chi and yoga. Those concepts can get a bit esoteric, even seeming a little off-topic. But let's not forget: violin playing is both a physical pursuit and a practice that requires uncommon devotion. In that context, we certainly can use some sound body-mind advice, and Weilerstein, at age 85, has been honing his message for many years! Weilerstein's ideas about projecting intimacy were in response to the day's first performance, by student artist Josh Liu, who played the first movement of Bernstein's "Serenade, after Plato's Symposium." Liu, a master's student at Yale University, played the very exposed opening to this movement with excellent control, with a good mix of vibrato and non-vibrato. He also not only hit the insanely high A but also applied vibrato here. (Symposium Artistic Director Brian Lewis had spoken of that note in his pedagogy class the day before, commenting that it's so high, "it's actually here..." reaching all the way behind his head!) The movement eventually evolves into an elegant dance, and here the music started feeling a little internal - or to say it more simply, too quiet to let the audience in. Weilerstein addressed this by going straight to the fundamentals: he had Josh play a scale, then asked him where he felt the sound. The answer: his chest. Weilerstein wanted him to think more like