| David Garrett Part maverick, part genius, total virtuoso, David Garrett, 25, has been surprising people since before he was four years old. It was then that his father gave him a violin (he was having a tantrum because his older brother had a violin teacher) and, without any lessons, the toddler picked it up and began playing. Fast forward just four years and David was already one of the foremost violinists in the world working with the most celebrated teachers and performing solos with legendary orchestras and conductors. "After two months without a teacher I was playing better than my brother," laughs David now (his brother promptly gave up and took up piano, by the way). "I think my parents thought there must be some talent there, so they started to send me out to teachers." Working with the best teachers available in his native Germany, where his German father was a lawyer, his American mother a professional ballet dancer, David performed in front of an audience for the first time at the age of four. From the age of eight, with a management team already behind him, David was playing solo with leading international orchestras, including the London Philharmonic, the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Russian National Orchestra and attracting the attention of the world's foremost music teachers and conductors, namely Zubin Mehta, Claudio Abbado and Mikhail Pletnev. He even performed under the direction of the legendary Yehudi Menuhin. "I'm flabbergasted when I listen to recordings of myself at that age," says David, without a hint of vanity. "It is kind of weird to hear someone so young play so well, even if it is me." Mind you, at the time, while his friends were becoming experts at PlayStation, he was putting in seven hours practice a day. With his father, a musician himself, mentoring him and with major tours requiring home tuition, David was rather isolated as a child and, in his own words, something of a "geek." "I'd listened to nothing but classical music until the age of 14," he says. "So when I started going to regular school, and started to be exposed to all this pop and rock, it was a revelation." He was particularly taken with hard rock -- about as far away as you can get from the Beethoven and Mozart he was already well known for. "In school I was the odd guy," he says. "But I'm good at adapting. Image and clothes became important and I started downloading Hendrix, Led Zeppelin..." And he still has great respect for the rock heroes, insisting that you have to be in total control of your instrument to be able to pull it off like they do. Well, if anyone should know...
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