victor viktoria

On a sweltering night at the trendy Spitz club in Spitalfields Market, cool new music is on offer, as purveyed by a hyper-cool combo called Between The Notes. Dominating the scene with her violin is a statuesque Venus who might be from another planet: Viktoria Mullova, who began life as an infant fiddler in Moscow, is a classical-music superstar whose recordings of Beethoven are the critical talk of the town. So what brings her here? Well, she's married to the personable young cellist who's leading the band, but there's more to the story than that. To discover exactly what, I beat a path to her Holland Park door.

It's open, and the place is crawling with workmen finishing off an architectural work of art.

Mullova is brewing tea, so her husband Matthew Barley shows me round.

Their practice rooms are bare but beautiful, and everything is exquisitely Oriental from the hot-spring stone tub to the Japanese rock-garden with its black-bamboo shrubs, from the Balinese washing bowls to the 2,000-year-old Chinese bronze urns. On a sofa reading is Viktoria's 12-year-old son Misha Mullova-Abbado it's end of term, explains Barley, and the boy's feeling zapped. We'll come to the significance of his surname later, but it's clear that what excites his mother most is his musical talent.

When he was two he would tell her off for skipping a section while practising a piece, and sing the missing bit. 'He's much more naturally talented than me,' she insists. 'His memory is phenomenal he can play anything by ear on the piano. He can do the whole of the Lord Of The Rings soundtrack, for half an hour at a stretch, with all the modulations.' Misha also plays the French horn, and sings in the choir at London Oratory school.

'But he's more likely to be a composer, or a conductor. He's not obsessive, he's not going to be a soloist like me. And I'm more than happy about that.' Indeed, the way she describes them, her own beginnings sound joyless. 'It was my parents' decision that I should start playing the violin at four, and my father accompanied me to all my lessons. By the time I was five, my profession was decided.' But the monolithic Soviet state poisoned everything. Born in 1959, Mullova grew up in a 'horrible' climate. 'In Moscow at that time, one careless word could cost you your liberty, and one careless note could damage your chances of artistic success.' Her own success was built on obsessive perfectionism, but there were seeds of rebellion. While preparing for the Tchaikovsky competition music's Olympics, which she went on to win she was secretly listening to the Bee Gees' 'How Deep Is Your Love'. Her own version of that three years ago recorded for her CD Through The Looking Glass, with Matthew Barley and jazz pianist Julian Joseph was proof of her final emancipation.

But meantime came her defection in 1982 a dangerous manoeuvre, planned in such secrecy that not even her parents knew in advance and her flight to the West. Fetching up in Vienna, she moved in with maestro Claudio Abbado, but their four-year relationship foundered in acrimony when she got pregnant with Misha.

Even today, Abbado still doesn't want to know, but he does send a monthly allowance, and hasn't been able to prevent his son inheriting both his name and his musical gift.

As we speak, two younger children come bounding in to the room accompanied by their Russian nanny: eight-year-old Katia Mullova- Brind violinist Alan Brind was Mullova's intermediate partner and lastly, five-year-old Nadia Mullova-Barley. They speak English with their mother, but Russian with the nanny. When I ask how Russian Mullova now feels, her reply is unhesitating.

'Not at all.' She loves her life in London even loves the Tube she's gone native in the happiest possible way.

But her musical self-liberation is still going on. She's been eight years with 38-year-old Barley, and it's taken him a long time to get her to improvise, to overcome her Russian terror of playing a wrong note her freeing-up is now continuing with an Italian baroque group called Il Giardino Armonico.

First she was induced to play on gut strings that may not sound dramatic, but the slightly lower pitch upset the perfect tuning she had had since infancy. Then they made her swap her conventional bow for a shorter baroque bow, which revolutionised her approach to Bach. 'The baroque bow seemed to play Bach all by itself. Because he composed for that, it's much easier to play him with it. And the result is completely different music.'

When she appears at the Royal Albert Hall on Tue 12 Aug, it will be to play Sibelius's Violin Concerto In D Minor. Is she looking forward to that? 'I'm quite scared. If it's hot, it's hard to move your fingers fast. And the acoustic there is difficult.' Next year she's due to take a muchneeded eight-month sabbatical, and she even professes to be a bit scared of that, because Barley wants her to stop practising. 'If I did stop, I might start to feel I was not a musician any more.' I'd say there was not much danger of that.

Viktoria Mullova, Tue 12 Aug, Royal Albert Hall, Kensington Gore, SW7 (020-7859 8212).

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