“Mommy, I want to do that!” a three-year-old Julia Pautz told her mother in 1983 when she saw a group of children playing violins at a San Antonio Symphony children’s concert. Born here in Blanco, she started lessons at four years old and received her first violin for her fifth birthday. Longtime Blanco residents might remember her playing for fiddle contests on the square and for community choir concerts, and at the Baptist church, the Gem of the Hills, and the local nursing homes.

Leaving Texas to pursue top-notch teachers at the Cleveland Institute of Music where she graduated with honors, she then continued studies on full scholarship at the following: the University of Southern California where she received the Pi Kappa Lambda award for the artistically and academically outstanding graduate student, the Colburn School in Los Angeles, Aspen Music Festival, and the New York String Orchestra Seminar at Carnegie Hall. She has just completed her fourth year with the Fort Worth Symphony.

Now the hometown girl comes back to share her love of classical music with those she grew up with.

On Friday, September 24, the people of Blanco will have the opportunity to hear the grown-up Julia perform with the critically acclaimed Hall Ensemble in the opening concert of the Blanco Performing Arts Concert Series at 7:30 p.m. in the beautiful Uptown Blanco Ballroom at 317 Main Street, just south of the first-rate Uptown Blanco Restaurant.

The Dallas Morning News review of the Ensemble’s July 25 concert at the Basically Beethoven Festival called “Pautz a genuine virtuoso… dispensing fleet skitters and strings of double stops and darting flawlessly into the violinistic stratosphere.” Please call 830-833-4762 to get tickets for this extraordinary event.