I am to meet Viktoria Mullova at her house in a fashionable part of west London. I ring her doorbell with a certain amount of trepidation. Every so often, music critics find themselves in awe of an artist, and the Russian-born violinist has always mesmerised me, turning in performances of such intensity and technical audacity that they beggar description.
She is also beautiful and charismatic, radiating a serenity that contrasts strongly with the emotional density of her playing. She opens the door and ushers me in. I perch on a sofa. On a table are antique Chinese vases and a statue of Buddha. When I ask her if she's a Buddhist, she gracefully shakes her head. "No," she says, "but look at him in profile. He's beautiful, don't you think?"
Even though she is casually dressed in a black woollen top and a voluminous brown skirt, she looks staggering. I ask her if she likes fashion. "Of course," she says, laughing. "I wear different things for different composers." Brahms and Beethoven find her sewn into a clingy, metallic sheath. For a Bach tribute at London's Wigmore Hall, she wore austere black. "Sometimes I have beautiful dresses and chiffon," she says. "But I can't play Looking Glass in that. It's a completely different experience."
Through the Looking Glass is the title of a massive project Mullova has undertaken with her husband, cellist Matthew Barley, together with jazz pianist Julian Joseph and a group of percussionists whose work spans a multiplicity of disciplines. To pigeonhole it, you would have to come up with some cumbersome term like "classical-jazz-pop-rock-fusion". It consists of a collection of pieces, ranging from the Bee Gees to Miles Davis and Duke Ellington, all of which are transformed into something radical and strange. "We don't like the term `crossover'," Mullova says. "We're not crossing to anywhere. It's new music. It's not a jazz concert. I can't pretend that I can play jazz. You need a lifetime's experience to play jazz." She's being modest: Mullova plays jazz as well as she plays everything else.
Looking Glass ostensibly began life a few years ago when she was on a tour of the Far East with pianist Piotr Andrzsewski. "The record company asked me if I'd do an encore CD, a disc of display pieces, like Kreisler." Unsurprisingly she turned down this idea for an album of showstoppers. For her encores on the tour, however, she was playing arrangements of spirituals by Jascha Heifetz, and Barley came up with the idea of a disc of her favourite non-classical pieces. "We wanted to get contemporary composers to do the arrangements," she says. "But it got so complicated. Someone suggested that Matthew do the arrangements himself." Barley - who has his own group, Between the Notes, and plays everything from Bach to jazz - came up with an extraordinary amalgam in the process.
In its structure, Through the Looking Glass is inherently classical. Part suite, part rondo, its sections are held together with a series of variations on "Robot 415" from Miles Davis's Decoy album. The variations are interwoven with numbers by the Beatles, the Bee Gees and Weather Report; Erroll Garner's Misty, Ad Lib on Nippon from Duke Ellington's Far East Suite (a playful hint, perhaps, at its origins), Youssou N'Dour's Life and All I Really Want by Alanis Morissette. Like Alice's looking-glass house, it has a strange logic of its own.
"You can't say what is what," Mullova says, and there are times when the music quite genuinely seems to spin beyond genres and pull down imposed divisions. Misty has the restrained poise of one of Bach's solo adagios. The Robot variations veer in turn towards Bartok, Satie and Bernard Herrmann (a very scary take on the music for the shower scene in Psycho, complete with plug-hole gurgles and an unnerving thud as a body hits the deck). "The Alanis Morissette piece - it's screechy music," Mullova says, "but here it's so delicate." When you hear it, you almost think it could have been written by Stravinsky in neoclassical mode.
Some people have already been slightly fazed. A try-out at London's Gainsborough Studios last summer was enthusiastically received, though she and Barley subsequently made changes to the order of the pieces. The finished version toured Europe last autumn and she played London recently. Getting it on has sometimes proved tricky - several venues in Germany turned it down. "It's not classical, it's not jazz. They can't put it anywhere. People are so narrow-minded."
Liberation - freedom of expression and from restraint - has dominated Mullova's life. The ultimate origins of Through the Looking Glass go far back beyond discussions with record companies, to her student days. Born in 1959, she trained at the Moscow Conservatory where her teacher - officially, at any rate - was Leonid Kogan. A great musician, Kogan, it would seem, was more active on the concert platform than in college. "He didn't have much time to teach," Mullova says frankly. "I actually studied with his assistant for eight years."
It was while she was studying, however, that she was first exposed to rock, pop and jazz. "In the dormitory of the Moscow Conservatory there were a lot of foreign students. They had tapes and cassettes." In 1982, she won the Tchaikovsky prize, the conservatory's greatest award for young instrumentalists. While she was preparing for the competition, she found herself listening repeatedly to the Bee Gees' How Deep Is Your Love? The song finds its way into Looking Glass where, as a meditative duet with Julian Joseph, it forms the emotional kernel of the entire sequence.
The Tchaikovsky competition brought with it international fame ("but it didn't get me many concerts - I wasn't that established," she says ruefully), though what really flung Mullova before the public was her dramatic flight to the West in 1983. The restrictive atmosphere of the Soviet Union had become too much.
She says it "took one year to plan the trip, to plan how to escape". "It was difficult to get out. They always made sure that if you left, one member of the family had to stay behind - a parent, a child, someone like that. I left with my boyfriend. The government wouldn't allow couples to leave. The KGB didn't realise we were together. They thought he was playing the piano. He was actually a conductor, but he pretended he was my accompanist. He'd only really been playing the piano for a couple of months. We went on a tour of Finland, did a couple of concerts together. It was nervewracking."
Her boyfriend's pianistic inexperience at one point very nearly gave the game away. "Can you imagine," she asked me, "what it was like working with an accompanist who just suddenly stopped? We had one day free," she went on, "so we took a taxi over the border to Sweden, to try to get to the American embassy. Finland was closed to Russia at the time. If they'd caught us we'd have been put in prison." They evaded the Finnish authorities, but when they got over the border, they found the embassy shut. "We were in hiding for two days. It was the weekend of the Fourth of July. We had no food for three days. It was front-page news."
She's been back to Russia just three times in the past 17 years, though she has continued on occasion to hit the headlines, not always in ways that she has liked. The reporting of her private life has pained her, and she's understandably reticent when she comes to discuss it.
She lived with the conductor Claudio Abbado in Vienna for four years. "It was an important relationship. We had a son together - Misha," she says quietly, though earlier, when I mention the great live recording of the Brahms Concerto, that she and Abbado made during a Berlin Philharmonic tour of Japan, she is happy to talk about it. "It was Claudio's idea. It was a live performance on TV. I was petrified but, when I started to play, I gave a good performance." This is an understatement if ever there was one. "Claudio said, `Why don't we record it?', and he managed to get all the exclusivity clauses sorted."
Though her husband, Matthew, isn't with her on this occasion, he is never far from her thoughts, and his name threads its way though our conversation. Together on the platform at the Gainsborough last summer, the affection between them was palpable. "We've been together for five years," she says. "We got married two years ago." They have a daughter, Nadia. While she was pregnant, she gave another unforgettable performance, this time of Bartok's Second Concerto, at the Proms. "The heat was terrible," she says. I only remember that she looked immaculate in a cream trouser suit and played the concerto like no one on Earth.
Between Abbado and Matthew, there was a third relationship but she doesn't talk about it, other than to say she has another daughter, Katia.
As I leave, she gives me a copy of the Looking Glass CD. "The last track's my favourite," she says. It is The Air That I Breathe by The Hollies, transformed into a languid, sensual tango with a whiff of Debussy. At its close, Mullova plays a slow, arching cadenza that soars upwards in freedom before descending back to earth in contentment. It's a moment that sums her up. Through the Looking Glass will doubtless cause controversy, but like everything this remarkable woman does, it will be impossible to ignore.