THERE is, to the untutored eye, something miraculous about the violin virtuoso. Extreme facility on any musical instrument is always impressive to watch, of course but facility on a fiddle has a fascination all its own, perhaps because of the way the instrument nestles gently beneath the chin, perhaps because of the way the bow dips, soars, flashes across the strings, perhaps because of the a freedom the player has to move time to the music, leaning towards the audience every bow and again in a seductive conspiratorial gesture. It is a heady combination of apparent intimacy and absolute mystery. How do violinists acquire the phenomenal technique necessary to play the testing works of the standard repertoire? Why do so many violin virtuosi happen to be cute little kids aged anywhere between four and nine? And how do such tiny kids manage to get a handle on an instrument from which most off us would be hard pressed to draw any sound more appealing than a demented cat squawk?

These are questions which have stumped even the doyen of the species, Yehudi Menuhin. In his a recently published autobiography, Unfinished Journey, he describes his first tentative steps on his instrument. "I was invited to fly," he writes "I answered by hanging on for dear life ... Then, for no reason I could the violin began to lose its fitness, my grip relaxed, my discovered the freedom to itself, and I could enjoy was doing ... By such strokes illumination, the solution pro so mysterious as the problem leaving one almost as blind fore, most violinists learned craft."

Menuhin learned his craft in the 1920s, and it would be reasonable to expect things to be rather different in the hi tech, up and a em, jet set music world of today. But when the latest young virtuoso on the international scene, the Japanese American violinist Anne Akiko Meyers, describes her early musical experiences, it is clear that the essential mystery remains. "I started with the violin when I was four," she says. "Basically my parents just wanted me to have an appreciation of music, but I showed a strange aptitude for it, right from the beginning. Playing came very naturally for me. Trying to find something in the music, and express it, was the most important thing but to express the music you need an arsenal of colours, and so rather than trying to acquire a technique it was more like I was searching for a colour, and to get that colour I had to play a certain way.

"I was playing like that for most of my life until I went to the Juilliard School in New York City, where I was taught how to go back wards clean everything out, basically give myself a gut renovation and to really understand what I was doing. Dorothy DeLay at Juilliard intellectualised the whole process for me."

Some 21 years later, can she still remember the very beginning? "Yeah, I remember the day clearly. It was raining. And I tried the violin backwards like, with the strings on the bottom, you know? I was standing on the couch, and my father came over and said, no, the violin goes this way.

To this day," she adds, with a self deprecating laugh, "I'm still trying to figure it out." If her reviews are anything to go by, she seems to have it figured pretty well. Her maturity and lyricism are constantly singled out for praise, as is her technique, which is often described as "flawless".

She has notched up a mouthwatering CV of appearances with top orchestras and conductors, and has made a series of highly acclaimed recordings for RCS Victor Red Seal, including a glorious performance of Cesar Franck's violin sonata which she refers to, irreverently, as "my Frank Sinatra CD".

She still works on her technique, to keep it in shape, but it's no longer a central concern. "I always start with scales," she says. "That's a good warm up, which I've always done. But technical exercises like Paganini caprices or something? No, that I don't do. You can practise and practise and practise some of my friends are practising, like, seven, eight hours a day but they don't really grow because they're never creating. You only create when you're on stage making me with her people and learning from your mistakes and falling flat on your face many times. That's the only way to learn. You can make yourself more aware by listening to recordings that other people have made, but you really only learn by pushing yourself to know what your limits are."

Isn't it intimidating, listening to the vast array of recordings on offer by fabulous fiddlers from Jascha Heifetz to Anne Sophie Mutter? Or is there a certain onus on the up and coming musician to find out what interpretations have gone before? "I've always been curious, says Anne Akiko Meyers. "I need to know, and like to know, what someone else has done with a piece." There is, however, a subtle line to be drawn between listening and absorbing in this way, and simply copying someone else's interpretation. "In a way everybody's imitating everybody else, I mean, music is tradition but complete plagiarism is not on. Why would you be playing a piece at all if you had nothing new to say?"

HAVING something new to say is one thing making your voice heard in a musical environment where virtuosi seem to grow on trees is quite another. Anne Akiko Meyer happens too be an attractive young woman whose photo in a hill length lace evening gown would grace any CD cover, but she's adamant that hard sell marketing official classical music and musicians is not the answer. "I think a lot of people do get caught up in the whole thing of music being a business. That's a real danger. I've been playing since I was four, working in this specialised field for my whole life and the priorities of people who work for record companies, their vision, is different to mine."

Each of her albums has, she says, been a little bit quirky, featuring unusual repertoire. "I had to sell that idea to the record company, even with my latest album, which is all American music. It's not really saleable music but it's interesting music and deserves to be heard. I'm not into playing the same repertoire over and over like, who wants to buy another Mendelssohn album? There has to be real thought put into how to pair pieces with something interesting and new.

In the end establishing an identity is, she insists, best done by "playing and learning and listening and making musical friends", and by "always transplanting yourself into every musical situation that you come across".

"It might sound exhausting, but that's the way of creating your own space and making the most of what you have. And it's also about life. You're not, like, this delicate egg to immerse yourself in life only makes your music richer, because music is really the byproduct of who you are as a person.