David Garrett

A lot is made of the youth of today’s pop stars. Look at the singles charts and you’re likely to find a whole lot of artists who are legally unable to do some of the things you’ll hear about in the other songs. From getting utterly wasted on everything under the sun to driving. However, artists in the world of classical music must look at them and laugh themselves silly. If you want to be a great classical musician, you’d better know your major scales by heart before you know the alphabet that well, and if you haven’t learnt your minor scales by the time you’ve started school you can forget about it. David Garrett is a perfect example of this. Lorde might have been performing covers on national radio by the time she was 13, but Garrett was a prize winning violinist by the time he was five.

What makes this more incredible is how it wasn't even going to be him playing originally. The first violin that Garrett’s father bought was for his older brother, but the four year old Garrett pretty much immediately took a shine to the instrument and was winning competitions within the year. By seven he was enrolled at the Lübeck Academy of Music where he excelled as something of a prodigy, he spent five years there and at the age of 12 he was taken under the wing of legendary Polish violinist Ida Haendel. This was, of course, after receiving his first Stradivarius violin the year before when he was 11, by this point he’d become renowned for his talents, and he made his first two CD’s by the time he was 13. He was also tapped for concerts on TV in his native Germany and The Netherlands.

Now, this is all extremely impressive but it could also be where it stops. It would be nothing new to hear about the child prodigy captivating a country for a summer, before either folding due to the pressure of it all or said country losing all interest but neither of those happened. Garrett went from strength to strength, performing with the Munich Philharmonic at 16, enrolling at London’s Royal College Of Music, studying at Juilliard a couple of years later (which he paid for by modelling, as if he wasn’t infuriating enough already), and it only got even more astonishing in his twenties, where he was able to set the world record for fastest violin player in the world when he was 26. The man is more than just a talent, he’s pretty much a force of nature and in the classical world he’s still practically a baby.

The best is yet to come from David Garrett, and if his seventeen studio albums, four DVD’s and eight awards are anything to go by, his best is going to be incredibly special indeed. Highly recommended.