When the New York Philharmonic opens its season this week, a new violinist will be sitting in the influential concertmaster chair at the front of the violin section, just to the left of music director Alan Gilbert.

His name is Frank Huang, a 37-year-old violinist who until June held the same post with the Houston Symphony Orchestra. He emerged as the winner after a two-week audition with the Philharmonic last October. He'll now be in a position to have a great impact on the sound and style of the Philharmonic – more than any musician on the stage after Gilbert himself.

Not only will Huang serve as a liaison between Gilbert and the orchestra, but he will be head of the string section and establish bowings that all of the violinists follow. He'll make a featured entrance at the start of the concert, supervise the tuning, and play solo violin passages, starting with this weekend's performances of Strauss's Ein Heldenleben (his debut is Thursday night in a concert broadcast by WQXR).

"The more time I spend here the more I'll have a sense of what the tendencies are or what we should strive for," Huang said in an interview. "We always want to keep improving and sounding better and better."

The 33-member violin section currently represents an assortment of ages and backgrounds. The longest-serving members were hired under conductors Dmitri Mitropolous and Leonard Bernstein. Five have arrived in the last decade, according to the orchestra's website. Huang, who replaces 34-year veteran Glenn Dicterow, will be the Philharmonic's first Asian-American concertmaster, reflecting a section that increasingly has Chinese, Japanese and Korean roots.

Frank Huang, violinist

(Gordon Chibroski/Portland Press Herald via Getty Images)

Described by colleagues as soft-spoken but intensely competitive, Huang has pushed through periodic difficulties to become the highest-ranking musician in the Philharmonic. He was born in Beijing and moved to the U.S. at age two. After living with his grandparents, he reunited with his parents at age seven in Houston and immediately began violin studies with his mother (and mostly put aside sports, notably basketball). At age 16, he left Houston for a precollege program at the Cleveland Institute of Music where he studied with Donald Weilerstein.

In 2002, injury struck as Huang was entering the Indianapolis International Violin Competition. He had developed severe tendinitis as a result of an overambitious rehearsal schedule at the Marlboro Festival in Vermont. He competed anyway, and recalled having to ice down his left arm after each round. "I never had played that much before, and my left arm was really overworked," he told the Indianapolis Star in 2003. "By the time Marlboro ended last year, I was in pretty bad shape. I almost dropped out of Indianapolis a few times."

Huang placed fourth, and later said the shaky showing in Indianapolis helped him understand his limits.

That same year, Huang moved to New York to study with Robert Mann at Juilliard. But that only lasted about half a semester. "I only had three lessons, because I was out of town so much,” he later told the Santa Fe New Mexican. "Then Juilliard decided it wasn’t worth it, because I couldn’t go to any classes, so I ended up just jumping out of Juilliard." A Juilliard spokesman confirmed that he didn't graduate but declined to elaborate.

By this point, however, Huang was increasingly busy as a soloist. In 2003 he took first prize at the Walter W. Naumburg Foundation's violin competition, which brought him $10,000 and a debut recital at Alice Tully Hall. A recording for Naxos followed.

In 2009, Huang took a gamble, moving to Rochester, NY to join the Ying Quartet. For 17 years, it had been an all-sibling ensemble, until first violinist Timothy Ying left to pursue a business opportunity. Huang faced being an outsider in the quartet. But the Houston Symphony recruited Huang with an unusual aggressiveness for its open concertmaster position. The lure of returning to his hometown was great, said Huang, and he took the job in 2010.

Huang says his experience going through a music director search in Houston will help him as he starts in New York, where Alan Gilbert is poised to step down in 2017. "It's something that orchestras go through. It's not an abnormal thing," he says (Houston hired Andrés Orozco-Estrada in 2012). "The stability that an orchestra requires is partly the result of a very cohesive sense of teamwork between the concertmaster and the principals."

Is there anything about New York City about Huang is excited about – or which gives him pause? "What I remember from my time here in New York, as much as I love the city, it was hard to find nice places to live," he said. "I moved around every year; it was very difficult to find roommates in certain situations. That was a big concern when I was thinking about moving back."

Frank Huang and Sarah Ludwig, violinists

Frank Huang and Sarah Ludwig, violinists

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Just days after Huang won the Philharmonic job in April, he married his girlfriend, Sarah Ludwig, a violinist with the Houston Grand Opera and Houston Ballet.

This week, he is dealing with familiar new-on-the-job issues: getting his company e-mail working, finding his way around the orchestra's offices and living out of a suitcase while apartment hunting. He and Ludwig recently ventured to Koreatown in Manhattan for dinner. "The food scene we're very excited about. We're both foodie people."