What does it take these days for an accomplished classical musician to gain public recognition? Apparently, something well beyond great music-making. Last year, I received a promotional mailing from a major record label describing a highly talented violinist on their roster as a “sex kitten.” And how is her intonation? I wondered.

I’m not oblivious to the physical attractions of musical artists. But I feel a bit nostalgic for a time when the term “natural endowments” was meant to convey a musician’s inborn talent.

To be sure, cultivating extra-musical sizzle to increase audience draw is nothing new. Think of aristocratic ladies showering Liszt with their jewelry while he played, and of Paganini encouraging the rumor that he was in league with the devil. But there is a difference between the demonic spark in Paganini’s racing fingers and the jolt of Elvis’s gyrating pelvis. They serve dissimilar purposes: The first is an extra, added attraction; the second, the main event.

We tend to blur those distinctions in this post-modern age, when glamour and novelty have taken an equal footing with deeper artistic values.

The issues aren’t always so simple, however. Consider guitarist Sharon Isbin, who performed, along with principals of the New York Philharmonic, this past Sunday at the 92nd Street Y. Ms. Isbin recently recorded three big concertos with the New York Philharmonic (on Warner Classics), the first guitarist ever to do so. She is a Grammy-Award winner whose repertoire ranges from the Baroque to the contemporary. She was a student and colleague of Rosalyn Tureck, the Bach specialist, and directs the guitar departments at the Juilliard School and the Aspen Music Festival. This is serious stuff.

But my alarms went off upon learning that her concert at the Y included a suite she commissioned based on songs by Joan Baez. Or that during the first week of February, Paris celebrated “Sharon Isbin Week” at the Theatre du Chatelet, at which she performed a world premiere with rock guitarist Steve Vai (she also had a bestselling recording called “Journey to the Amazon,” with Brazilian percussionist Thiago de Mello and saxophonist Paul Winter). And that her next career move will be a guest appearance this March on “The L Word,” Showtime’s series based on the social lives of lesbians.

“I’ve never been forced to do anything for the sake of career,” she told me. “Don’t forget, when I started doing so-called crossover music-it was back in the 1980s-‘crossover’ was considered a dirty word. Nobody wanted to do it. It was actually viewed as potentially damaging to a career.” It has proved to be anything but.

“It’s about being open to new experiences and being curious about the world,” she said of her decisions. “None of this is calculated – it all happens organically.”

Ms. Isbin began studying classical guitar at age 9 with a specialist in Italy. She had already given up the piano out of boredom after only two years of study. “The guitar was unbelievably exotic, and so unusual for an American,” she recalled. “It also felt very personal, because here was an instrument that had to be built for me, and I had to cradle it in my arms and caress it. It was a whole different sensuous experience.”

Training for classical guitarists was at that time hard to find; hence her desire to work with keyboardist Rosalyn Tureck- by all accounts, a difficult taskmaster. “I started out wanting a guide for Baroque performance practice, but it became much more than that,” she explained.

“I learned to demand of myself a kind of perfection that no one had put me through before. We spent one year on just one suite. At every lesson I thought we would move on, but we kept taking up the same movement over and over, with new levels of thought each time. She didn’t play the lute, so I was very much an active part of the process of finding solutions to the musical challenges.”

Her invitation to appear on “The L Word” came about because she liked the show and submitted some of her recordings at the urgings of friends. Meanwhile, the producers needed a musician for a scene that takes place in a club. They were so taken with her performance that she ended up with speaking lines as well.

At Sunday evening’s concert, she showed an ease and warmth in the music making, with a marvelous command of color and of dynamic shape. Throughout a program of Vivaldi, Albinoni, Rodrigo, and de Falla, the atmosphere was intimate and controlled, without a hint of flashiness. Indeed, Kaufmann Concert Hall seemed to take on the air of someone’s living room. The “Joan Baez Suite,” arranged by the late John Duarte, was actually a pleasant surprise, slyly incorporated elements of Purcell, Schubert and the blues. And the closing Boccherini Quintet for Guitar and Strings was charmingly evocative of the Madrid in which he had composed some of his best known early works.

This chamber performance was clearly the flip side of her recent Paris adventure. And say what you will about the dangers of glamour and popular appeal, Sharon Isbin is one artist whose natural endowments are worth celebrating.