Vanessa-Mae has been called a Paganini in hot pants. Or, to put it another way: she dresses to kill, but you ain't seen nothing yet till you see her pick up a violin.
Half Thai and half Chinese, Vanessa-Mae Vanakom Nicholson was born in Singapore and grew up in London. She took up the violin at the age of five. By the time she was eleven, the Director of the Royal College of Music was calling her a "true child prodigy--like Mozart and Mendelssohn."
She was a rising star in the world of classical music, but Vanessa-Mae also had some ideas of her own about music. As a teenager, she began experimenting with her talent, and released The Violin Player, which she called a "techno-acoustic fusion" album. It featured both traditional and electric violin, hit the U.K. pop charts, and went multi-platinum.
Some critics objected to the video of Vanessa-Mae playing a techno-pop version of Bach's Toccata and Fugue in a wet T-shirt, and scratched their heads when they heard that she would be playing a violin solo on Janet Jackson's The Velvet Rope album. Vanessa-Mae responded: "When you're brave enough to do something new, people are always threatened by it."
Few audiences that see Vanessa-Mae give a live performance have any objections. More often they are left awestruck, roaring for an encore.