Vanessa-Mae plays the violin. She has not only been compared with Menuhin, Heifetz and Kreisler but the Director of the Royal College of Music pronounced her a "true child prodigy - like Mozart and Mendelssohn" when she was 11. The youngest in the world to have recorded both the Tchaikovsky and Beethoven Violin Concertos, by 13 Vanessa-Mae had made three highly praised recordings. She performed with the Philharmonia aged 10, toured internationally with the London Mozart Players and made her UK debut tour with the Tchaikovsky concerto at the age of 12. Half Thai, half Chinese, Singapore-born Vanessa-Mae moved to London at four, adopting British nationality. At five, she took up the violin. At eight, Vanessa-Mae reached the first crossroads of her life, choosing to concentrating on the violin, after collecting her prize in the British Young Pianist of the Year Competition. Vanessa-Mae is now 16. She shares the same birthday as the legendary Paganini and was born on 27 October 1978. Aside from performing classical all over the world, Vanessa-Mae has appeared on many huge rating network TV and radio shows where she has performed classical repertoire as well as many of her own arrangements. For Children in Need, she kicks off show with her own arrangement of Toccata & Fugue. 
Like all virtuosos, Vanessa-Mae is drawn to exploring new territory and standards for both violin and technique. Though steeped in the classical discipline, Vanessa-Mae enjoys a wide spectrum of the music available for today's music lover. These influences show. She started writing her own cadenzas for Mozart concertos at 9, went on to play her own arrangement of "Over the Rainbow" on the Children's Royal Variety Performance, and recorded arrangements of contemporary pop tunes by Paganini and Heifetz as well as her own versions of "Yellow Submarine" and other "pop" songs. 
"Beethoven and Beatles, Mozart and Michael Jackson, Paganini and Prince - I like them all. I have always known what I like and what I don't. What I like, I want to play. You only live once, and in this life I will hopefully play the violin for most of it. I therefore intend to play just about everything I like on the violin - and more...." On her new album, "The Violin Player", Vanessa-Mae introduces both acoustic and electric violins in a unique techno-acoustic fusion which is hybrid of many musical genres. As Paganini applied physics and mathematics, Vanessa-Mae enjoys bouncing exciting violin solos off accompaniaments by computers, as well as musicians. Her instrumentalism and musiciality have led critics to use words "supernatural" and "phenomenal", since she makes the most fiendishly difficult and unorthodox always appear "effortless", fun and natural. Next year, she extends her wide eclectic tastes into the concert hall, touring venues all over the UK in concert programmes combining traditional classical concertos with the indefinable but exciting techno-acoustic violin virtuoso repertoire she is developing for herself and for violinists of future generations. 

Antun Opic/Diana Savcic/Olga Lang /Sabine Rothmayer