Carol Cook must be quite a sight at the airport baggage claim. There she is, one tour stop after another, carting around not only her luggage, but her Scottish fiddle, her classical viola . . . and her golf clubs. Cook was in the habit of winning Scottish fiddling contests as a child, but now that she’s just turned 30, music competitions are behind her. Instead, in her spare time she golfs, an obsession introduced to her two years ago by baritone Bryn Terfel, and encouraged by her frequent partner on the links and in the concert hall, fiddler Mark O’Connor.

“I won my first tournament yesterday at the local club,” she said not long ago while on vacation in Scotland. “I got a big trophy and everything!”

Cook still takes an innocent delight in being a champion, even after all those first-place fiddle wins in her childhood. Perhaps that’s because as an adult musician she only occasionally goes solo, instead taking key positions in ensembles—one of the principal violists in the Metamorphosen Chamber Orchestra (an East-Coast group currently on hiatus), principal violist in the Chicago Lyric Opera orchestra, and middle voice in the Appalachia Waltz Trio, where she partners with fiddler O’Connor and cellist Natalie Haas.

“She is probably one of the most caring and thoughtful string players that I could ever hope to collaborate with,” says O’Connor.

“She understands many different types of music, and how to emotionally put her viola at the heart and center of whatever she’s doing. I think of Carol as one of the best, most sympathetic string players that I could ever work with. Her careful balances, her ensemble playing, and her ability to step out and take the viola into an entirely solo virtuosic role all in one fell swoop is extraordinary.

“I would put her among the very top violists I have ever heard.”

O’Connor first heard her during his 2001 “American Seasons” tour with Metamorphosen. “During rehearsals I heard this glorious, beautiful viola sound of Carol’s,” he recalls. “A couple of days into this 30-city tour I was absolutely loving her playing, and my ear would drift back to her sound while I was playing. Also I noticed that our conductor, Scott Yoo, praised her often, and he was very critical of the players. So I thought she was someone I should probably befriend.”

O’Connor did a double-take when Cook told him she was also a Scottish fiddler. O’Connor invited her to teach at his summer fiddle camps, and whenever he was in New York he would head to Juilliard’s practice rooms to jam with Cook, who was pursuing a master’s degree there, and cellist Natalie Haas, then a Juilliard sophomore who also taught at O’Connor’s camps.

“It was immediate chemistry among the three of us,” says Haas. “You can tell when you’re in a chamber group with people who really listen well and match well, and Carol can probably match anybody strokewise or tonewise; she’s very sensitive. And she’s the only person I’ve ever heard who plays viola like a fiddle. It’s like when I hear Edgar Meyer play the bass; he plays it like a cello, and makes it look so easy. Carol makes her viola sound like a fiddle—she’s playing all these ridiculous fiddle melodies on it, and makes it sound really good. That’s very rare.”

Cook has had both classical and fiddle music in her fingers since she started Suzuki training at age three in her small hometown near Inverness, in the north of Scotland. Both her parents were music teachers and played in a Scottish dance band. They served as her only teachers until she was 12, and that’s why she started entering fiddle competitions when she was five—and winning them at eight.

“It was a bit hard on them to motivate me to practice when I didn’t have the incentive of a lesson with an outside teacher every week,” Cook admits. “One way they got me to practice was putting me into competitions.”

Cook loved the fun, friendly atmosphere she found at the fiddle contests, certainly looser than the few classical competitions she entered. But she kept up with her classical playing, too.

“I kept the two worlds very separate for a long time,” she says. She felt fiddlers would think her “inauthentic” if they knew she played classical music, and classical musicians, she says, “looked down on fiddlers as people who didn’t have a good technique or good sound.”

Yet she says she owes much of her facility as a classical musician to her work in traditional music.

“Fiddlers have a relaxed left hand and bow arm, and being relaxed allows you to play fast, and I loved the fast reels when I was a kid. So I got a virtuosic left hand from playing a lot of fiddle music.

“It also helped me develop spontaneity in my classical playing. When you’re playing fiddle music, you’re always improvising grace notes and bowing, improvising around the notes, like Baroque players used to do. So I think possibly my classical playing is more spontaneous and intuitive than it may have been had I not had that background.

“I don’t have to separate them in my head because I’ve done them both so long. You wouldn’t play a Brahms sonata the same way you would play Bach, so I just make the same sort of adjustments to add Scottish fiddle into the equation.

“Especially now, it’s important to be open to all different music styles. The wider your musical abilities, the more employable you are.”