The South China Morning Post of December 5th 2004 had this article on our Vanessa-Mae:
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Violinist unruffled about her intercultural leap into dance music
Vanessa-Mae has her critics frothing but she's too busy pushing the boundaries of classical music, writes Clarence Tsui
For someone talking about a stalker who's followed her around for 10 years, Vanessa-Mae looks unperturbed. In fact, she's astonishingly nonchalant about it, dismissing suggestions that it's a niggling problem.
'If you have a stalker you don't want him to affect your life,' says the 26-year-old violinist. 'The moment I stopped going out, enjoying myself and being independent he would have succeeded in getting to me.
'At the end of the day, being a stalker should be his problem and not my problem. The fact that he hasn't obviously got a life outside his stalking should make it his problem rather than me changing my life for him.'
It's all the more remarkable given the potential threat the man could pose to the violinist. When David Martin, a 57-year-old former hospital engineer, was arrested last year loitering near her house in London, he was carrying a knife and two of her albums. 'I still go to the studio and I still drive myself home - my boyfriend couldn't wake up in the middle of the night and collect me from the studio at 4am because that would just be silly,' she says.
Martin, who confessed that he first started following Vanessa-Mae when her debut album, The Violin Player, was released in 1995, has repeatedly broken restraining orders which banned him from approaching the violinist or even visiting her neighbourhood. 'He's banned from London now which is pretty serious. It's great that the police take it seriously. Luckily, they don't wait for you to actually be kidnapped or your dog to be killed or strung up outside your house to take it seriously.'
The way she manages to crack a joke at her tribulations is evidence of Vanessa-Mae's composure. Throw any question at her and she comes up with an unflustered yet somewhat rambling answer, whether it be about her fraught relationship with her mother, whom she sacked as her manager when she was 21 ('It's almost more important for her to be my manager than my mother, I think'), the acerbic criticism she unfailingly receives from music critics (she once described herself as 'the first one to bastardise Bach with beats') or how the media pays more attention to her attire than her adagios ('It's just like when you go out to dinner with someone: you can't control the direction of our conversation').
With her fluorescent and mostly fabric-saving wardrobe, frequent appearances at glamour events, a home in the affluent London borough of Kensington, and a much-publicised relationship with her long-term French boyfriend, wine merchant Lionel Catelan, Vanessa-Mae revels in a frivolous existence not unlike the It Girls who incessantly wrestle for exposure in the tabloids. Such details, however, tend to overshadow her significance in music - not merely her status as one of the most talented violinists of her generation, but also how she turned serious music on its head by blending classical music with pop-driven postures.
'I think it's a bit blind of them not to realise that music is constantly evolving and they shouldn't be so frightened as to [insist on] preserving it as it is - because it will die away completely, which in itself is not such a big problem. It can't compete with pop music and they shouldn't even try to,' she says.
'I'm advocating and crusading for the violin. It's a bonus for me if more people are interested in classical music but I'm doing it for myself and for the violin as an instrument.'
Vanessa-Mae's discography is proof of her diverse tastes: since The Violin Player, she's dabbled in disco and acid jazz (Storm), Chinese music (China Girl) and condensed rearrangements of the classical canon (The Original Four Seasons). Her last album, 2001's Subject to Change, is her most radical effort - a club-friendly record that aims for the atmosphere of, according to Vanessa-Mae, 'a Moby or Basement Jaxx album'.
It was an experiment that backfired: the album's run-of-the-mill electronic vibes sounded like an artist in the middle of a crisis of creativity. Vanessa-Mae's position as agent provocateur in classical music was gradually usurped from both ends of the musical spectrum - groups such as Bond and The Planets took over the populist end of the market with their three-minute pop songs with strings, while Eroica Trio lapped up listeners who wanted a dose of sex appeal in their Ravel and Rachmaninoff.
'Subject to Dance is very esoteric - I enjoyed making it and performing it on tour for a couple of years. That was a lot of fun, but listening to it six months later, it sounded dated.'
Vanessa-Mae says for her latest offering, she wanted to make an album that wasn't so modern. 'I just wanted to make something I knew six years from now I could still think is a quite mature album - instead of being all beats and samples, I wanted to convey emotions in performance, for it to be an album on virtuosity.'
The result is Choreography, an album of dance music for concert-goers rather than clubbers. Backed by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, it sees the violinist drawing inspiration from musical elements such as boleros, tangos, and Aram Khachaturian's Sabre Dance. Adding to these indigenous elements is material which is marketed as World Music. Bill Whelan, the man behind Riverdance, wrote Emerald Tiger, a mixture of Irish and Chinese musical motifs; while Bollywood soundtrack composer A.R. Rahman contributed Raga's Dance. 'I've never been to India, but at least now I get to work with Rahman,' says Vanessa-Mae, who admits to previously having never heard Rahman's material - not even his most well-known work to date, the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical Bombay Dreams.
Vanessa-Mae - who has faced criticism of watering down classical music through her work - is undaunted about the flak she'll receive for this cross-cultural blending. 'It's through the whole craze of endorsing more Indian culture in the west that would help us appreciate Bollywood music - otherwise people would just associate it with, like in the UK, films that are shown at 2am when everybody else has gone to sleep. It's only by crossing different worlds and cultures that you can find out about
each other.'
The self-assured Vanessa-Mae also believes Choreography, bearing what she sees as an intercultural leap, will be just as much a pioneering musical act as The Violin Player - including that infamous music video of Toccata & Fugue featuring the then 15-year-old the violin, wet and in the water. 'Prior to that video you'd never seen a musician, a classical violinist, doing a promotional video so I think it was very important for me to have had that chance when I was young,' she says.
'[My music] has been called so many things - techno-acoustic fusion, crossover, modern classical. In a way it's a new genre - when I first came onto the scene there wasn't a genre in the label for this music, there wasn't one in the music stores.
'I think it's quite good because as a result of me taking a risk 10 years ago it has now become a style of music that's here to stay.'
And so Vanessa-Mae sails on, unruffled and self-confident, between the devil and the deep blue sea of stalkers and critics.
Vanessa-Mae in the South China Morning Post
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