Joshua Bell is a very busy man. The violinist plays roughly 100 dates a year as a visiting soloist with orchestras around the world. But increasingly, he’s finding a home on the road in the other 30 to 40 concerts he performs with a venerable British chamber orchestra, the Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields.

The Academy is primarily a touring ensemble. Serving as their music director doesn’t give Bell any relief from the constant churn of airports and hotel rooms he calls “exhausting.” But in the nearly five years since he took the group’s helm, Bell says he and the orchestra’s musicians have developed a relationship that helps him delve deeper into compositions he already knew and loved.

“They’re an amazing group. They play chamber music like a big, glorified string quartet the way they listen and sit on the edge of their seats. It’s an experience I treasure.”

Bell serves a dual role, both leading the ensemble and playing in the concertmaster’s seat. For violin concertos, he alternates between facing the audience as a soloist and turning around to conduct with his bow.

In his solo career, Bell says he’s always been interested in the intricacies of an entire composition, not just his own part. Having the job of directing only enhances the experience. “[Conducting] makes me listen even more astutely and it breathes new life into music I’ve been doing for many years.”

Returning again and again to the same ensemble also gives Bell a degree of regularity he hadn’t had before. For dozens of dates each year, he can rely on the sort of understanding that colleagues only build through familiarity. Everyone on the stage knows what he’s looking for if he leans a certain way or raises an eyebrow just so. Bell says that lets them all “go deeper into the music and not start from scratch each time.”

For their performance at the Schermerhorn on Tuesday, Bell and the ensemble will be playing a program of music by composers he considers the two great prodigies of music history: Mozart and Mendelssohn. Both were accomplished and acclaimed as teenagers, and both wrote in a crisp style that Bell says shows off the Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Field’s gift for precise playing.

The show will be bookended by pieces inspired by Mendelssohn’s travels: his Italian symphony and Hebrides Overture. In between, Bell has programmed Mozart’s Fourth Violin Concerto, a work he hadn’t performed before this tour.