NICOLA Benedetti and I are playing a word association game. If I say the word “success” I say to her, what comes to mind? In her home in London the Scottish-born violinist goes quiet. And stays quiet. For so long that I start to speak.

“I’m still here,” she interrupts. “I’m thinking.”

Another beat. And then she begins.

“Success, I think, is clearly defining for yourself what you think is a challenge and difficult to achieve that you then can achieve. Or what brings you a level of integrity and satisfaction, perhaps happiness. But not in an escapist way … I mean a fulfilment.

“And then being able to have the discipline and determination to execute that set of values.”

The achieve of, the mastery of the thing, in short. As one of the country’s most recognisable classical musicians, someone who has played the last night of the Proms, Carnegie Hall, and all points in between, Benedetti knows all about that, of course.

Some people quit when faced with lockdown. Others don’t. When the pandemic abruptly smothered live music, the violinist Nicola Benedetti threw her considerable energy into finding new ways to connect people online to music and, through that, to one another. Now the Scottish star soloist is preparing for a Prom, where she will perform Prokofiev’s Violin Concerto No. 2 with the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain and, at last, a real, live audience.

In Focus: How the violin virtuoso Nicola Benedetti is changing the way we teach music

The violinist Nicola Benedetti speaks to Claire Jackson about virtual teaching, playing Elgar and lobbying the government.

A patchwork of string players waves and smiles at the camera. The participants, aged two to 92, are dotted across the world, from Scotland to Siberia. A cat peers over a music stand as one young musician wrestles with a tricky phrase, trying to emulate the posture demonstrated by the violinist on his phone.

TURNING thirty is a landmark for anyone, but for Scotland’s international star violinist Nicola Benedetti it proved a particularly pivotal moment. On the evening before, she performed at the BBC Proms with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales and conductor Thomas Sondergard, playing the Shostakovich Violin Concerto No 1 that featured on her most recent […]

Feature: Nicola Benedetti’s Coming of Age The Economist 1843 By Clemency Burton-Hill March 2017 Issue Nicola Benedetti exploded onto the British classical music scene in 2004 after she won the BBC Young Musician of the Year competition, aged 16, with a blistering performance of Karol Szymanowski’s fiendish first violin concerto. Since then she’s been Female […]

By Catherine Womack

Scottish violinist Nicola Benedetti was 17 when she met American jazz legend Wynton Marsalis. A rising classical star, she was on her own in New York for the first time for a performance at Lincoln Center. “Kathleen Battle sang in the same concert and Elie Wiesel spoke,” she recalls. “Itzhak Perlman was […]

It’s a steep, steep climb to my dad’s village in Italy. He grew up in the area surrounding Pisa, but left for Scotland when he was nine years old. After a lifetime of hearing stories of him departing the beautiful mountain top village of Farnocchia on a donkey, I finally visited, with my parents. The […]