KEY POINTS:
Julian Rachlin, at 31, is a concert-hall veteran with 18 years on international stages behind him. Next Tuesday, Aucklanders will be able to experience him in recital with pianist Richard Hyung-Ki Joo.
Rachlin, only 13 when he won the Eurovision Classical Competition, still remembers "walking down all those steps to the Concertgebouw stage, aware that 40 million people were watching it on their televisions".
At 15 he made his Vienna Philharmonic debut under Riccardo Muti, and his 1992 recording of the Sibelius Violin Concerto with Zubin Mehta and the Pittsburgh Symphony is still considered by some critics to be among the finest available.
That all changed when he turned 18, Rachlin says. "I never thought of myself as a prodigy but the media immediately makes you one. Inevitably you have a crisis. Suddenly you are not a child any more, but not quite a grown-up. You start questioning everything. I was very close to giving up."
Rachlin survived, but he emphasises that "there is a real danger when careers start so well and so early - they don't always have a continuation".
For seven years now the violinist has been driven by his Rachlin and Friends festival in Dubrovnik, the medieval Croatian city he fell in love with when he first visited it in 2000. The most recent gathering featured Maxim Vengerov, Mischa Maisky and actor Roger Moore, the one-time James Bond, narrating with an orchestra.
"He does it each year," Rachlin says. "Last year it was Carnival of the Animals, this year Peter and the Wolf and in 2007 it will be The Soldier's Tale."
Despite a concert schedule of 139 performances a year over five continents, "Dubrovnik is the place I invest the most energy in," he says. "It lets me create and make my dreams come true. So many ideas are born there, musical projects which occupy my whole season."
It was the Mozartian riches at Dubrovnik in 2004 that led film director Phil Grabsky to shoot a good deal of footage there for his In Search of Mozart documentary, putting Rachlin on the cinema screens of the world.
And there is Mozart on the bill next Tuesday, the composer's Sonata K 526, "a milestone from one of Mozart's most inspiring periods". Some have compared it to Beethoven's later Kreutzer Sonata. Rachlin says it is "more like a piano concerto as the piano part is incredibly difficult".
Some in the audience may be surprised to see Rachlin with a slightly larger instrument for the Shostakovich Viola Sonata. The truth is that Rachlin's favourite instrument is the cello and it's the viola that allows him to get closer to his mellow-toned ideal.
"I have always wanted to be a cellist but it never happened," he says. "I love those low-register and darker colours and, when I play the violin, those have always been more attractive than the pure, shining virtuosity of the violin."
Nevertheless, however taken Rachlin might be with the viola, it would be difficult to imagine him leaving his 1741 Guarneri del Gesu violin on the shelf for long. "This man is the only genius that can be compared to Stradivarius," Rachlin says. "If someone tells you he has a Del Gesu, then you jump on him like a dog."
And what might inspire such action? "It's a very urban and animalistic sound, quite unlike the noble, silky tone of the Stradivarius. There are two kinds of violinists, one made for Stradivarius, one for Guarneri del Gesu, and I definitely belong to the latter."
Where and when: Auckland Town Hall, Tue Nov 21, 8pm
