Alina Ibragimova

Alina Ibragimova

Alina Ibragimova places her phone strategically at the edge of the table as we sit down for coffee in a bar near the Royal College of Music in Kensington. It's obvious she's expecting a call, but I don't find out until the end of the interview how important that call will be. It's a last-minute invitation to play at the Proms for an indisposed Maxim Vengerov.

Ibragimova is due to fly to Russia tomorrow for an annual family get-together, and she really needs the break: 'It's been a long year. I've just finished my degree and I have a busy schedule in the autumn.' She is looking forward to some pampering from her grandmother - 'She likes to feed me everything she knows how to cook - which is a lot!'. But Ibragimova knows she can't pass up an opportunity like this. Playing with the London Symphony Orchestra (LSO), she'll be learning two Piazzolla pieces arranged by John Adams and a few days later performing to a live audience of thousands and a broadcast audience of many more thousands.

Ibragimova, an elfin blonde with Scandinavian cheekbones and a no-nonsense manner, seems cool about the prospect of standing in for Vengerov: 'I've said I'll look over the music and let them know tomorrow.' Perhaps it helps that her father Rinat Ibragimov is principal double bass of the LSO and has complete confidence in her. Her mother is a concert violinist who put her own career on hold when she had a family and taught her daughter from the age of four. It was a fiercely musical household - Alina may have missed out on nursery rhymes, but the first thing she remembers singing was Schubert's Sonata for Arpeggione. 'I didn't have a clue what it was; I'd just heard my father practising it.'

'What was most convincing about the astonishing performance [...] was the profound maturity and impassioned conviction brought to the sombre, haunting interpretation'

Looking at the glowing concert reviews going back at least five years, it's hard to believe that Ibragimova has only just graduated from the Royal College of Music. Though she's just turned 22, she's been performing in public since she was a teenager at the Yehudi Menuhin School in Surrey (she played at Menuhin's memorial service) and has appeared on the radio many times over the last two years as a member of the BBC New Generation Artists scheme.

'Actually I haven't graduated, technically,' she corrects me. 'I haven't handed in my last essay, and until I have time to do it I'm not officially a graduate.' During her three years at the Royal College, however, she has notched up many extra-curricular triumphs - playing the Bach Double Concerto with Gidon Kremer, Mendelssohn with Charles Mackerras and the Philharmonia Orchestra, and Mozart with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra.

Critics agree that this is a remarkably mature and accomplished performer in works ranging from Romantic to gritty serialist. On her recent performance of Shostakovich's Violin Concerto No 1 with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, the Scotsman's Michael Tumelty wrote, 'What was most convincing about the astonishing performance by Ibragimova of the Shostakovich was not the sizzling virtuosity and mind-blowing acrobatics of her playing (they can all do that) but the profound maturity and impassioned conviction brought to the sombre, haunting interpretation of the work.' Alina bristles. 'I think of the hours I spend practising and then they say that?'

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