Who would ever want to be a violin prodigy? Sure, audiences won’t be able to get enough of you when you’re a sweet little thing powering your way through Paganini on your pint-size violin, but as soon as you advance past the cute stage, the next prodigy is right behind you, ready to take your place. There’s a long list of wunderkinds who’ve hung up their Strads when they hit their teens.

English violinist Chloë Hanslip is one of the exceptions. Confident and poised, the 19-year-old former prodigy is enjoying a burgeoning international solo concert career and, with several recordings already under her belt, has recently released a well-received disc on the Naxos label featuring the John Adams Violin Concerto, making her internationally known.

The critics can’t seem to get enough of her. Reviewing her performance of the Sibelius Violin Concerto with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra under Mariss Jansons, the British Independent newspaper wrote, “Hanslip produces a full-blooded sound: her wide-spaced vibrato and powerful resonances rendered her an expressive, idiosyncratic advocate of the Sibelius: intense, passionate, not without cheeky waywardness. Her dazzling technical proficiency made sparks fly in the finale.”

Born in Surrey, to the south of London, Hanslip’s life as a prodigy began when, just able to walk, she toddled up to the piano and tapped out tunes. Her older sister, then a piano student at the Royal Academy of Music in London, was not pleased. “She would get very indignant and say, ‘She’s ruining my music!’” says Hanslip. “My parents didn’t want another pianist in the house, so they started me on the violin.”

Hanslip began studying the violin alongside her mother, as is the tradition in the Suzuki method. However, her mother soon bowed out. “After six weeks she was told she could give up because I was better than her,” laughs Hanslip. At five, she played for the legendary British violinist Yehudi Menuhin, who sent her to Natasha Boyarskaya, the main violin teacher at the Menuhin School.

“I didn’t like lessons very much,” remembers Hanslip, “but I’m incredibly grateful to her now, because she’s the person who really gave me the basis of my technique.”

At seven, Hanslip played for Zakhar Bron, the great Russian teacher whose pupils include violinists Maxim Vengerov and Vadim Repin. Bron and Hanslip immediately hit it off. “The fact that I was living in Surrey and he was living in northern Germany didn’t really bother either of us,” she says. “But my father said, ‘Professor Bron, we have to talk about this [traveling],’ and Bron said, ‘What is there to talk about?’

“So my mother and I moved to Germany when I was nearly eight.”

By Hanslip’s account, her lessons with Bron were bliss, but going to the German school was painful. Hanslip was academically ahead, but a step behind socially because she didn’t know German (she now speaks it fluently). She recalls, “The other children had trouble accepting a little eight-year-old prodigy with big glasses who played the violin and who was English,” and so the young Hanslip was bullied.

Returning to an English prep school two years later wasn’t the solution, as she was still academically ahead of her contemporaries. Plus, says Hanslip, “I was never there! So I was home educated from the age of ten.” She thrived as a homeschooled student, getting high marks on the standardized tests and, later on, was offered a place at Oxford University.

She turned it down in favor of the violin.

She’s had a few other detours from the prodigy path, however, such as playing a prodigy in a film when she was ten, in Onegin, which co-starred Ralph Fiennes and Liv Tyler. Hanslip loved every minute of it—except for not getting to wear any makeup. “When I got there, they said, ‘You have a perfect Russian complexion, you don’t need any makeup.’

“I was so disappointed!”