Even if I’ve played a piece a hundred times, it still feels new.”On the other hand, he cautiously paces his own development. I still feel, every time I go on stage, as though I’m newborn. I didn’t have the technique I have now, but across the years the intuition is the same Musically speaking, I was the same person I am today I’m now just a bit larger I hope it will always be like this. I felt it was a privilege for the audience to see me.” His programme that day included Paganini variations, “which were very easy for me”.What is his view now of the recordings he made at that age? “It’s incredible, that a teacher could have achieved such things with someone so young. “When I went on stage, before I had even played a note, I bowed so deeply and so long that the audience laughed – but I knew that this was what great artists always did. It seemed very desirable to sit in front of the audience and show off.”Armed with a miniature instrument, he and his mother gatecrashed their way into a lesson with the best teacher in town. “In my fourth lesson, I played her 80 songs by heart, and she said to my mother, `We have a genius’.” He gave his first concert at the age of five.

As a baby he was routinely pacified by the turning on of a tape-recorder: “Music was for me a replacement for food.” His father was an oboist and his mother conducted a choir, but at the age of four young Maxim settled on the violin “I chose it because of its location in the orchestra. Many more people should do this kind of work – it’s an excellent way to build the future.”He himself moved straight as an arrow toward his goal. `That reminded me of the orphanage that my mother ran in Siberia, where she had 500 kids – some of whom were already criminals – playing and singing, and me singing along with them. He’s worked with traumatised children in Bosnia and Uganda, and talks with frustration of the limits on what he could achieve.

Where will Vengerov fit on that scale? “We must wait and see.”But what marks him out above all from his fellow virtuosi is the scope of his activities. “I always thought that I’d do it one day, though not as early as this,” he says. “But I’ve been feeling the need to share my music in new ways, and transmitting energy with my hands and eyes seemed a natural progression. On his emergence eight years ago, Vengerov’s playing was imbued with timeless wisdom beyond his years; he now holds the stage with immense and charismatic authority.
So it comes as no surprise that he is about to add a new string to his bow. We have been dazzled by Midori, bemused by Joshua Bell, astonished by Sarah Chang, but none of those could hold a candle to this miraculous 25-year-old Russian fiddler from Novosibirsk.