Vanessa-Mae Vanakorn Nicholson
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 only 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 at aged 10, toured internationally with the London Mozart Players and made her UK debut tour with the Tchaikovsky by the age of 12.

Part Thai, part Chinese, Singapore born Vanessa-Mae moved to London at four, adopting British nationality with her English father. At five, she took up the violin. At eight, Vanessa-Mae reached the first cross roads of her life, choosing to concentrate on the violin, after collecting her prize in the British Young Pianist of the Year Competition.

Vanessa-Mae is now 18. She shares the same birthday as the legendary Paganini and was born on 27 October 1978.Aside from performing classical concerts all over the world, Vanessa-Mae has appeared on many massive rating network TV and radio shows where she had performed classical repertoire as well as many of her own arrangements. For Children in Need, she kicks off the show with her own arrangement of Toccata and Fugue in D Minor.

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 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 the contemporary arrangments of tunes by Paganini and Heifetz as well as her own versions of Yellow Submarine and other “pop”   songs.

On her 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 accompaniments by computer, as well as musicians. Her instrumentalism and musicality have led critics to use words 'supernatural' and 'phenomenal' probably for the paradoxical reason that she makes the most fiendishly difficult and unorthodoxed always appear 'effortless', fun and natural. This year, she extends her wide electric tastes to 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 violinsts of the future generation.

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