Chloë Hanslip is telling me, quite casually, about her car accident, not a fender bender, but a rather dramatic crash. She explains that she was driving her Mini Cooper along the M25 motorway when her world spun around, literally. “A 40-ton lorry just didn’t see me, ran into me, and smashed me into a concrete wall,” Hanslip says matter-of-factly.

The 19-year-old British violinist drops this story into a conversation about her musical tastes, so I’m a bit taken aback.

What happened next? I ask.

“I got smashed in the face by the airbag cover, but other than that I was fine, luckily. Quite why I’m here, I’m not sure.” She apologizes for “going off on a tangent” and we’re right back on to the subject of music.

Hanslip is full of these types of surprises. In part, this may be her way of dispelling the prodigy mystique, although because she’s been in the limelight since she was young, she has a poise beyond her years. Despite the nonchalant pose, I sense something that’s more than just the cocky self-confidence you expect from a highly accomplished young person.

When I hear her play in a chamber-music concert at the Wigmore Hall a few nights later, she’s the standout in a talented group, a small young woman who confidently draws a powerful, mature sound from her Stradivari.

A London orchestral musician who’s followed her career says simply, “She’s the real thing.”

The critics seem to concur. Of her recent Naxos disc, featuring the John Adams Violin Concerto, Gramophone magazine raved, “Playing like this should secure Chloë Hanslip’s reputation for life,” while the Times of London wrote, “She is promising no more; at the age of 18, she seems the complete artist, able to rival well-established players with subtleties of expression and a firm grasp of what the music needs,” praising her version of the Adams as “the most persuasive yet.”

If any single Adams work could sum up Hanslip’s life so far, it would likely be “Short Ride in a Fast Machine.”

When Hanslip was born in Guildford, Surrey, to the south of London, her mother was 46 and running a ballet school and her father worked for IBM. While still a toddler, Hanslip began plucking out tunes at the piano, much to the annoyance of a pianist older sister. Not wanting another pianist in the house, her parents steered her toward the violin.

Hanslip took her first Suzuki lesson at age three, along with her mother, as is the Suzuki tradition. Laughs Hanslip, “After six weeks, she was told she could give up because I was better than her!”

At age five, after having already made her debut in London’s Purcell Room, Hanslip played for Yehudi Menuhin. He was impressed, but she was too young for the Menuhin School and was directed to private study with the school’s main violin teacher, Natasha Boyarsky. “I’d have three two-hour lessons per week—an hour for scales, an hour for studies, and if I was lucky, a quarter of an hour on a piece,” Hanslip recalls. “At the time, I didn’t like it very much, but I’m incredibly grateful to her now, because she’s the person who really gave me the basis of my technique.”

With this solid foundation, Hanslip went to play for the legendary Russian violin teacher Zakhar Bron, whose students include Maxim Vengerov, Daniel Hope, and Vadim Repin. They clicked immediately, says Hanslip. “I said, ‘I want to be taught by him,’ and he said, ‘I want to teach her.’ The fact that I was living in Surrey and he was living in northern Germany didn’t really bother either of us. My father said, ‘Professor Bron, we have to talk about this.’ He said, ‘What is there to talk about?’ So my mother and I moved to Germany when I was nearly eight.”

“At the beginning [Bron] was incredibly strict,” remembers Hanslip. “With Bron, it was, ‘You’re only eight years old, but you’re here to be a musician,’ which I’m extremely grateful for, I must say, because it made me very strong.”

Hanslip studied with Bron for ten years.

“He’s mellowed a lot in the last few years,” she says fondly, adding, “Even if he was stomping and shouting in a lesson, at the end of it, he’d always give me a hug.”