Grammy-winning violinist Augustin Hadelich plays Tchaikovsky with SSO

Last month, violinist Augustin Hadelich won his first Grammy Award.

He isn’t likely to forget his chief collaborator in that achievement: the Seattle Symphony Orchestra.

Hadelich has been a favorite guest artist of SSO since his debut with the orchestra in 2012 and returns for a third appearance March 24-26, when he will play Tchaikovsky’s spirited Violin Concerto.

He earned his 2016 Grammy — in the best classical instrumental solo category — for his performance of Henri Dutilleux’s concerto “L’arbre des songes” on the album “Dutilleux 2.” Released on SSO’s in-house record label, “Dutilleux 2” is the second installment in a three-disc, multiyear project to record music by the late, idiosyncratic French composer.

Hadelich, 31, is a native of Germany who became a U.S. citizen two years ago. Reached by phone in New York, he said he couldn’t “imagine a better partner” than the Seattle orchestra and its music director, Ludovic Morlot, for recording Dutilleux’s music.

“They were so completely at home in his style. It all came together in a really wonderful way.” He said he learned the Dutilleux concerto for the November, 2014, recording session while he was in town to play a Mendelssohn concerto with the Seattle Symphony.

“Dutilleux’s music is so interesting and beautiful all the time,” Hadelich said. “From the first note, the orchestra really knew what it was doing. So coming back to Seattle is like coming back to a friend.”

What was it like getting the news about the Grammy?

“I was quite surprised and delighted,” he said. “I was following the ceremony online because I had just arrived at a conference. It was a great day. Everyone started calling and congratulating me. It was amazing.”

Unlike “L’arbre des songes,” Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto, written in 1878 while Tchaikovsky was recovering from depression, has been a frequent — if intermittent — companion to Hadelich since the age of 11.

Hadelich has made a point of not taking the concerto, or his interpretation of it, for granted, choosing to step away from the score for long stretches and returning for reassessments.

“You need breaks,” he said. “There are often old habits that are not great habits.”

Not that the piece could ever fit like a comfortable old shoe.

Now one of the best-known — if technically difficult — violin concertos, the Tchaikovsky work existed in two versions for years. One was the concerto as Tchaikovsky wrote it, and the other an altered score edited and rearranged by violinist Leopold Auer.

Auer found the original unrealistically complicated for a violinist and, despite creating his own edition of the score, he canceled a planned world premiere in 1879. The Tchaikovsky version had an 1881 world premiere (Adolf Brodsky was the soloist) which was roundly condemned by critics as pretentious and distasteful.

“Until a few decades ago, most violinists would do anything they wanted to the score,” Hadelich said. “They would change the notes and cut some things. They didn’t treat it with the reverence they would have brought to Brahms. I’ve never understood that. This piece is so well thought out, so perfect. I think there was a lack of respect for Tchaikovsky in the past.”

But, he added, “it is now a piece played so much you have to look at it as if you had never seen it before. That is a more natural way to play music and probably closer to what Tchaikovsky had in mind. His favorite composer was Mozart, and you see in his music that he loves certain gestures and shades that are very Mozartian. But he brings his own romantic language and elegance.”

Returning guest conductor Jesús López-Cobos will lead the orchestra through Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Scheherazade” (the 1888 antecedent to John Adams’ “Scheherezade.2,” which Adams recently conducted at Benaroya Hall) and Glinka’s “Summer Night in Madrid,” as well as the Violin Concerto.

“Every time I pick up the piece and get to know it again,” Hadelich said, “I think I love it even more.”