The excellence of Benedetti’s debut recording (Karol Szymanowski’s First Concerto, plus music by Chausson and Saint-Saëns), and its shooting straight to number two on the classical music charts, blunted the extra-musical criticism somewhat, as has the quality of her new recording headlined by Mendelssohn’s Concerto for Violin and Orchestra in E minor, Op. 64. Complementing the Mendelssohn is the world premiere of “From Ayrshire,” a two-movement piece by fellow-Scot James MacMillan, composed especially for Benedetti. The title is a reference to the musicians’ shared home county. Both of these pieces and a new arrangement of Schubert’s Serenade are conducted by James MacMillan with the Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. Completing the new disc are a harp and violin arrangement of Schubert’s Ave Maria and Mozart’s Rondo K. 373 & Adagio, K. 261, with the orchestra directed by Benedetti from the violin, and Mozart’s Adagio for Violin and Orchestra in E, K. 261.

It is apparent that the world of critics is expanding beyond the conventional media outlets into Internet blogs and other online-based formats. And these critics are often unconcerned with the “industry.”

For example, Charles T. Downey, writing on the influential Washington, D.C.-focused ionarts.com blog, opined that Benedetti’s playing of the Szymanowski concerto is “radiant, on her 1751 Petrus Guarnerius violin from Venice.”

He went on to note that “the London Symphony under Daniel Harding clothes her sinewy, lush, often languid solos in a sonic cloak of many colors. If Benedetti’s violin solo is the Tunisian Ganymede of Szymanowski’s fantasies, she is both shy and elusive and energetically dancing. Her E string playing, in particular, even in very soft passages, is remarkably well placed.”

Benedetti says she is “learning a lot, and very quickly, about critics.”

The key, she thinks, is knowing her own standards, “where I’m going, and keeping in touch with my own personality, from one concert to another.” The goal, she rightly recognizes, is not pleasing the critics; rather, it is “coming off stage and knowing that’s what I wanted to do.”

She might also be inspired by history and her Scottish heritage. In 1263, at the Battle of Largs, near where Benedetti was born, the Scottish King Alexander III successfully drove off a group of Norwegian Vikings in an epic four-day fray. For although they might not have had the looks of today’s London critics, the Viking invaders did share many of the critics’ more truculent characteristics.

And, just to prove that there is life ahead for this particular teenage sensation, Benedetti has goals and plans that should serve her well.

She has left the Yehudi Menuhin School and studies privately with Maciej Rakowski, the violinist and professor at the Royal College of Music (and former concertmaster of the English Chamber Orchestra), who lives 15 minutes from Benedetti. When she’s in Walton-on-Thames—which is often only for ten days a month—she’ll go around for lessons, “three two-hour sessions a week if possible.”

She has repertoire decisions to make, decisions that need to interact effectively with the goals her new record company has in mind.

“To establish myself,” she says, “I need to tackle the standards on my concert appearances: Mendelssohn, Mozart K. 216 and K. 219, Tchaikovsky, Szymanowski, Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, Glazunov, Bruch.

"And,” she adds, “I’m working on Sibelius.

“I definitely have a longer scenario in my head,” she adds, “but it’s early to completely plan it out too long in advance. Instead, I focus on always enjoying, and always improving. But by the age of 30, I intend to have established my own voice which, even now, I hear in one concert out of five.”

She' glad to have grabbed the recording opportunity, and has no doubts that it was the right thing to do. Besides, she has Alexander III and his troops on her side.