Nicola Benedetti at 15 - The Herald Magazine interview

To be fair, she has hardly made an effort either. The cocktail dress is still in her wardrobe. Instead, she has opted for cardie, flared jeans and fluffy pink slippers. Still, she looks perfectly at home, which may be because she is. We are sitting in the front room of the house she shares with a family in Walton on Thames. She is originally from West Kilbride, but now stays with Alison, an accompanist at the Yehudi Menuhin school where Benedetti was a student until a few months ago, Enrico and their three young children, all under ten. In among the throw rugs, the family photos and the toys our deviation from formal dress code seems forgivable under the circumstances.

While she prepares to play, she apologises in advance. Her bow is being mended and the one she is using might not be up to the job. "I haven't played with this bow for ages. It won't make a sound." Then she begins. She makes a sound. A beautiful sound. It's the opening of the cadenza from Henry Vieuxtemps' Violin Concerto Number 5, the piece she is going to play at St Martins in the Field in a few days to a rather larger audience than yours truly, one which will include representatives from the talent agency IMG.

She is playing from memory. Sitting just a few feet away, it is the physicality of her playing that catches the eye, the way she uses her whole body, not just hands and fingers. A few minutes in, though, she stops, apologises again. It's this bow she says, unhappy with the noise she is making. It sounds lovely, I tell her. But lovely, it seems, isn't good enough.

Nicola Benedetti sets herself high standards. But perhaps if you win a place to study at the Yehudi Menuhin School at just nine years old, when you have worked with Menuhin and the likes of Yan Pascal Tortelier before you are 12, and when you've been named Prodigy of The Year in front of family and royalty at just 14, high standards go with the territory.

High standards and a busy diary. A couple of weeks after we meet, she is being whisked off to Russia by Carlton Television to be filmed playing in St Petersburg. There is a concert in May in the Purcell Room in London on the South Bank and already she has bookings for next year. Oh, and come the summer, she is off to Glastonbury Festival where she'll be doing a show in the same tent as Jools Holland, a gig that comes a few weeks before her 16th birthday. Prodigy just about sums it up. And I haven't even mentioned the Barbie video.

At the end of this year, toy-makers Mattel are bringing out the latest animated video starring their number one doll. Barbie and Swan Lake it's called. The Barbie DVDs always include an educational element; an accompanying documentary. On Barbie and the Nutcracker there were interviews with young ballet dancers from the New York Ballet School. On Barbie and Swan Lake - because the video is full of violin solos - Mattel wanted to focus on a young violin player. They chose Benedetti. As a result, she has been recording with the London Symphony Orchestra under the aegis of conductor Arnie Roth.

The critics are equally enthusiastic about her. She's a virtuoso, they say, her playing mature beyond her years. Have you got a big head yet, Nicola?

"All it does is encourage me," she says. "I have the potential to be what I regard as a violinist who is extremely good and it just makes me work harder to think that people are hearing something special. I know how far there is to go, how much I need to work, how much I still can do."

The first thing that strikes you about Nicola Benedetti is her confidence. Perhaps that's inevitable in a young woman who has spent a third of her life away from home and has developed the necessary survival skills and sense of independence. A pretty, olive-skinned girl, she's bright, chatty and sure of her opinions. Media savvy too. When the name of a famous female violinist comes up in conversation she prefaces her comments by saying, "Don't quote me on this ... " (Let's just say she isn't impressed with the playing of the lady in question.) Before Benedetti starts playing, she shows me her violin. A Peter Guarnerius. An antique, from 1750. She has had it for three years now. It is an investment, she reckons. She tried out a Stradivarius, but it wasn't her. She hasn't given the violin a name. She has never even thought of it. It's part of her after all. "The violin is an extension of my voice," she says, holding it firmly but lovingly.

A few days later I'm sitting in another front room, this time in West Kilbride with Benedetti's parents, Giovanni and Francesca. Gio is a businessman: pharmaceuticals and cling film. Somewhere else in the house - which is roomy and sumptuous, complete with gym and swimming pool - is their other daughter, Stephanie, 19, up from London where she is studying at the Royal College of Music. Another violinist.

Benedetti's parents are showing me a video of their daughter playing, a recording of the St Martins in the Field gig. The Vieuxtemps. On the video, Nicola's fingers dance along the neck of her violin, the movements so fast as to be almost invisible. Gio and Francesca watch mostly in silence, basking in their daughter's achievements. They admit the video has been played more than once in the last week.

They are still talking to IMG about the possibility of representation. Turning professional is the next step for Benedetti. So far it's been down to her and her parents to sort out her timetable. "My parents and I just felt I need some kind of management," she says. "When the organisers of the concert call up and ask what my fee is, I really don't know what to say to them, so we're kind of getting to that stage at the moment."

Given that she can now expect a four-figure sum for a 20-minute recital according to her mother, then the need for an agent makes sense. But turning pro is something she intends to do on her own terms. "She doesn't want to be a Vanessa Mae type," says Gio. "Because she's obviously got the looks and she could do a Vanessa Mae and make a quick few million, but she wants to be known for her music."

Gio and Francesca speak about their daughter in tones of understandable pride and maybe even a little awe. "She never had to be pushed to practise," says Gio. A quick learner he says. "And she has this great love for what she does," adds Francesca. "There's ambition, yes, but the ambition comes from the love." It was a love that started early.

Benedetti first picked up a violin when she was four years old. It was her sister's fault really. Stephanie had been nagging her mother about playing since Nicola was born, but because the lessons required parents to come along it wasn't practical. When Stephanie was eight and Nicola four, though, Francesca gave in and both girls were taken to music lessons with Brenda Smith, then the violin teacher at Wellington School in Ayr. "My first lesson I cried all the way through," recalls Nicola, "just hated it, absolutely hated it. But after the second lesson, I just took off from there, found things quite easy and progressed quickly through the books."

At the start, practice amounted to a few minutes a day, but that soon built up to half an hour, an hour, then more and more. These days she practises for at least three hours a day. More often she'll play between four and seven hours a day, usually nearer seven than four.

When she was eight, she took part in the Ayrshire Music Festival, in the Open class competing against teenage students. She won. A year later, she sat her grade eight and then auditioned for a place at the Yehudi Menuhin school in Surrey. She passed. Suddenly she was faced with the prospect of leaving her home in West Kilbride to move to the south of England. "It was a huge decision," her mother Francesca admits. "It's not a decision you make lightly, sending a child away at nine years old. It's not easy. But I think she went with the thought that if it didn't work out she could always come back. At least she had to try."

Her father Gio had left Italy and his immediate family came to Scotland when he was just ten, so there were family precedents. Still, that didn't make it any easier for her parents. To make matters worse, as Francesca explains, their older daughter Stephanie left home at the same time, to attend Wells Cathedral School. "So both of them were out of the house," says Francesca. "It was a huge loss, almost like a bereavement, but we adjust, we all adjust."

Still, Nicola would fly home every weekend, making sure she paid a visit to Harry Ramsdens at the airport before making her way home. And there was always the phone. Even now mother and daughter talk every day. "My mum makes sure I keep my feet on the ground."

At the school she studied under Natasha Boyarskaya. "I was a dedicated little girl," she says. "I did everything she asked me to, I worked very, very hard." It was never a chore. She loved what she was doing. And then there were the opportunities to play with Menuhin himself. She did a tour with him, playing at the Unesco building in Paris with the maestro conducting. "He was an incredible person, a lovely, lovely man, really inspirational to work with. His musical ideas were unique. I haven't come across that since."

Nicola Benedetti on the cover of The Herald Magazine, April 12, 2003. Photograph Harry Borden

She was just 11 when he died, just two weeks before he was meant to have conducted her playing solo with the Warsaw Symphonia. (Yan Pascal Tortelier took his place.) She played at Menuhin's funeral and his memorial concert, performing the Bach double violin concerto with one of her best friends, Ibrag Imova. "It was quite an intimidating experience and very upsetting."

She even played with Menuhin's sister Yaltah in Glasgow - Yaltah's last public performance before her death. She loves performing, she is at her happiest when on stage - and she works hard at it. The visuals matter. "A lot of classical musicians regard that as not important because it's about the music," she says. "But there's no getting away from the fact that a lot of people go to see performances and if you see somebody on the stage who's really making an effort to present themselves well, then, of course it's going to make a difference."

She doesn't get nervous before a concert. "But I get excited and it's the adrenaline I suppose that builds up before the performance. It adds something to your playing."

Not too excited, though. Her mother remembers a concert Benedetti was giving in Birmingham. "I was in the toilet just getting myself organised," says Francesca. "And the hotel in Birmingham actually adjoined the symphony hall. I came out thinking she'd be standing ready, but she's lying back in bed finishing a sandwich. I said, 'Nicki, don't you think you'd better go? And she said, 'Oh just wait till Neighbours finishes.'"

Soap-watching apart, Benedetti knows she isn't living a normal teenage life. When she goes home to West Kilbride the friends she is still in contact with from Wellington School seem to spend all their time socialising. "They're always with their friends and I just think that's not what I'm doing, not at all. But I don't think I'd rather be doing that than doing what I'm doing. I'm much happier having the life I've got now. The violin alone has opened so many doors. I wouldn't even know half of these things existed if I hadn't left Scotland; left the little bubble I was in.

"I do find that if I meet any other students my age I don't have much in common with them, even with my friends from school. We've grown apart in so many different ways. Obviously I still get on with them well, but the things that interest me, the kind of life I'm leading, is just completely different to what they're doing. I don't really have many friends my age."

When she has some free time - which isn't often - she will meet up with a couple of friends from the Menuhin school or with her sister, go to the cinema, or out for dinner, "just relaxing things. I'm quite a social person ... I could be, I suppose, if I had the time to be. I definitely like going out with the people I get on with. I'm not too good with huge groups of friends."

What about boys? "Boys my age ... " she starts and then can't find the words. They take longer to mature, I suggest. "Yeah, definitely," she says. She probably doesn't even have time to think about boyfriends. "Well not necessarily, but they'll come second, not even second. My violin comes first. As long as I keep working hard then it's okay. Boyfriends, it's not a big issue and it's not ignored. It's just ... " In the background? "Yeah."

I assume this means she doesn't have one, but that's not quite true. "I kind of do," she admits on the phone a few days later. But that's all she'll say. He is not a musician, she says, and then clams up.

There is a Fame Academy video lying beside the television in the living room in Walton on Thames. The children's, I presume. "That's mine actually. Well, no it's sort of everybody's, but I bought it." Benedetti is not immune to the pleasures of pop music it seems. "I happen to be a bit of a Michael Jackson fan. A lot of classical musicians are just like 'what?' when I say that. But I think Michael Jackson's an incredible performer. I think he has an incredible talent. I've learned a lot from just watching the way he does things."

She asks me if I saw the Martin Bashir interview with Jackson. A little, I say. She has just watched it, the second version, the one Bashir didn't want us to see. "It's unbelievable what editing can do, so don't make me sound like somebody else," she says in mock warning. Like I say, media savvy.

"I think music's music. It's one language. I hear every single day, classical musicians degrading musicals, West End shows and pop musicians. But in every category of music, there are people who do it very well, who work hard and who do what they do to a high standard. So for me to say it's all rubbish and classical music is the best ... I won't do that. I'm never going to get to that stage and I'm not going to follow in the path of a lot of classical musicians who do that. It does annoy me."

At 15, Benedetti knows her own mind.

Actually she always has, but now she is happy to let other people know what she's thinking. Her mother Francesca tells me that when Nicola was 11 and something was wrong when she was playing she would keep schtum. "I'd say to her, 'Why don't you say something?' and she'd say, 'Mum, I'm 11. I don't want everyone in the orchestra to hate me.' Now she'll speak up, she'll stop the orchestra if she thinks there's something not right."

Nicola agrees. "I feel like I'm really developing my own opinions and musical ideas as I'm growing up. It's a confidence thing as well. I think at 11 I didn't have a lot of answers to back up what I felt musically." That is no longer the case. "Now I can make the connection between my knowledge and what I feel."

Perhaps that increasing self-confidence explains why she decided to leave the Yehudi Menuhin school last September and strike out on her own. "I'd been at the school for five years. It was just time to move on."

The school's demands on her time were beginning to get in the way of other commitments. They wanted her to do concerts on top of the ones she had already signed up for. And anyway there was the chance to get individual lessons from a new teacher, Walter Stewart. She is now his only pupil. Three weeks ago she also started taking lessons with another Russian tutor, Maciej Rakowski.

Francesca organises her tutors and lessons. She is doing her GCSEs this year: maths, English, French and a music A Level. Private tutors come to Walton on Thames for her academic work - but the motivation is all Nicola's. "It was very difficult at the beginning because obviously I didn't have any kind of schedule. But within a month or so I got into the swing of self-motivation because there's nobody to tell me what to do."

It's hard to imagine she ever lacks motivation. The life she leads is worth any sacrifice, she says. "I can't imagine what my life would be without the violin. There's no way I've got any regrets whatsoever. Yeah, I've had to work very hard and possibly sacrifice some things, but it's nothing I'm worried about. I couldn't be much happier than I am now doing what I'm doing."

Nicola Benedetti tells me that one day she'd like to play the Carnegie Hall. Her ultimate aim is to be a solo violinist. "I'd just like to be performing around the world, hopefully. Playing concertos, playing solos with orchestras hopefully, just what solo violinists do, I suppose." Maybe one day she will have time to follow other interests. She would like to do some dancing at some point. Not now, though. She hasn't got the time.

My taxi is waiting outside. She has to go and pick up her bow and get herself ready - ready for her concert, ready for St Petersburg, ready for the rest of her life. Some might say she already is.