Baby-faced violinist with a killer instinct

Siberian violinist Vadim Repin loves the do-or-die risk element of performance, writes HEATH LEES.

Vadim Repin is probably the hottest property on the world violin scene today. Critics and public drool over his dazzling technique and shimmering tone, concert promoters will do anything to get him on their programme, and the press give him the kind of attention that's normally reserved for film stars and rock groups.

In Britain, the Independent newspaper proclaimed him "the finest violinist of his generation". In Germany, the Berlin press describes him as "the best violinist living today", while Boston's Globe outdoes them all in hailing a "megastar performer ... an international, baby-faced killer violinist".

When he sits across from you in his hotel, puffing continuously on the kind of cigars that make the staff scowl and the smoke detectors jittery, you wonder what's so special about him.

Having recently notched up all of 30 years, he's starting to put a few wrinkles on the "babyface" tag, but there's a mixture of youthful elegance and boyish enthusiasm that lights up everything he says. When he tells you he wants to be the first violinist in space, or when you see pictures of him dressed in his black mandarin concert attire ("Elvis in pyjamas" the Americans call him) you understand how such world-class performers are re-creating classical music for today's younger concert-goer.

Colourful and engaging he may be, but his dedication and training are second to none. Discovered at the age of 3 by an amazed family who heard him playing whole tunes on an old squeezebox concertina, he was entered for the piano accordion class in the local school of music in his home town of Novosibirsk, in western Siberia.

"That was a joke really," he says, "since I was so small, you couldn't even see me behind the instrument. So they gave me a small-sized violin and I seemed to do well at it."

You get used to Repin's self-effacing understatements. After less than a year, the little prodigy was wheeled up to Zakhar Bron, one of Russia's most famous violin teachers. "I remember my mother pushing me into his classroom and closing the door, and I was left standing there, only 6 1/2, with no idea of what was happening. I played. Bron asked me to come over and show him my fingers. Ten minutes later we started working."

Bron was later to say that Repin was the youngest pupil he had taken on who threw himself so naturally into a gruelling round of practice for perfection, often for four or five hours a day.

Repin caused his first sensation when he was 11, at the International Wieniawski Youth Competition in Poland. Not only was he outright winner of the gold medal for his age-group of 5-16, his playing was deemed so extraordinary the judges decided to award him the gold medal for the 16-18 age group as well.

In 1989, at the age of 17, Repin won the coveted first prize at the Queen Elizabeth Competition in Belgium, and after that his career as a top-flight virtuoso violinist took off. By last year he had played to huge and adoring crowds in every concert-giving country in the world except China and New Zealand. Last year he did China, so now it's our turn.

In his travelling bag are two concertos - Russian, of course. There's the Tchaikovsky concerto which Repin describes lovingly as "romantic, warm, full of melody". But he changes completely when he mentions the other work, Shostakovich's First Violin Concerto. "That has the anguish of 30 million Russians in it," he says, "Often it's described as unplayable."

As though to confirm this, Repin has geared up some of the markings and the tempo to get closer to what his friend, the cellist Rostropovich, says was in Shostakovich's mind for the music. So he plays a killing but entire cadenza in the first movement and brings the finale up to the speed Shostakovich had originally wanted.

"At the end it is sometimes impossible to lift your arm just to shake the conductor's hand."

But the Siberian superstar admits it's the do-or-die risk element that fuels his performance life.

"A performance is a one-off thing. You get only one chance, and this gives you an immense excitement . Even when I was a little boy I loved it. I don't think I could live without it now."

* Vadim Repin plays with the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, conductor James Judd, at Napier Municipal Theatre on Wednesday; Hamilton's Founders Theatre on Thursday; Auckland Town Hall on Friday and Saturday.