Photo: Cameron Wittig

Tonight, the singer and violinist Andrew Bird performs a sold-out show at Carnegie Hall, armed with a well-mannered posse of fans and a new album, Noble Beast. Playing Carnegie Hall is a big event for even the most jaded musician, but it must carry special resonance for Bird, who came to pop from a classical background (he majored in violin performance at Northwestern) and tonight debuts as an Isaac Stern Auditorium headliner. Like many former—or is the term recovered?—classical artists, Bird seems to have had a conflicted relationship with his formal training. “I never was at home in the classical world,” he said in a 2005 TONY interview. “I wasn’t a prodigy. My teachers would say, ‘You’re very musical’—which is, of course, an abstract term—and, ‘You have really nice tone. But you don’t do the work.’ I just couldn’t bring myself to do scales or anything that would take away the mystery of the instrument and its sound. Somehow, I made it through music school. I made it a long way without ever learning to read [music]—I would just use my ear to learn orchestra excerpts. I was a nervous wreck.”