If lessons with Bron were a joy, life at the German primary school, where she’d been enrolled with a class of 11 year olds, was a trial. “The teachers were great, but I was bullied slightly,” she says. “The other children had trouble accepting a little eight-year-old prodigy with big glasses who played the violin and who was English”—and who had not yet learned German.

Returning to an English prep school didn’t work out either, so the family finally decided to home-school Hanslip. The decision proved to be the right one, as she did well in her standardized tests and was accepted for a place at Oxford University. (She turned it down, she says, in favor of the violin.)

Hanslip has that careful way of speaking that is characteristic of people who are prepared to switch to another language at a moment’s notice. This may be a legacy of Bron—their lessons were conducted in “a complete mixture of French, English, Russian, Japanese, Korean, Italian, Spanish, whatever,” Hanslip explains. “There are quite a few phrases that I’ve been using in German that my German friends say, ‘Chloë, we don’t really like to tell you, but those aren’t really words in our language.’ ‘Oh yeah,’ I say, ‘I picked them up from Bron.’”

Now fluent in German, she can also negotiate Italian and Spanish, with French, Russian, Japanese, and Chinese on her language hit list.

While still under Bron’s tutelage, Hanslip signed with the Warner Classics label to record five discs, but thanks to the reorganization of the label, she only made two. Typically, the upbeat Hanslip puts a positive spin on the situation. “I was extremely grateful for the time I had at Warner’s,” she says, “because I learned a lot of new things.”

On the cover of the first Warner disc, Hanslip sits cross-legged on the floor, dressed in a colorful top and jeans, and with her hair in long braids. The image is very playful, as is the largely encore repertory. Perhaps the Bron training shows itself the most on this disc, as Hanslip seems to suggest: “My recording of the Waxman Carmen Fantasy and Maxim’s are quite close. I didn’t listen to his before I recorded it, so it’s quite funny.”

The disc won her the German Echo Klassik Award for Best Newcomer in 2002.

The second Warner disc was far more meaty: Bruch Violin Concertos Nos. 1 and 3, recorded with the London Symphony Orchestra under Martyn Brabbins. The First Concerto is certainly one of the all-time finger-twisters by which aspiring violinists show their stuff, but the obscure Third?

Hanslip explains that she and Matthew Cosgrove, then Warner’s managing director, wanted something less known to couple with the First. Hanslip says she loves the Third: “It’s a little bit long-winded, possibly, but the tuttis are great. Especially in the last movement there’s a fantastic one that always makes me think I wish I was playing in the orchestra.”

With the reorganization of Warner Classics, Hanslip landed at Naxos, for whom she recorded the Adams concerto, a work she’d learned four years earlier for the possible Warner recording. Revisiting the concerto confirmed the greatness of the work for her: “It’s one of the mainstays of this generation and just a great concerto,” she says.

It has whetted her appetite for exploring more contemporary music.

Last October she received a scholarship from the Alfred Toepfer Foundation, for which she’d been nominated by her friend Bryn Terfel, the Welsh tenor. The scholarship will fund her continued study with Gerhard Schulz, a violinist in the Alban Berg Quartet, who is based in Vienna. Hanslip, who has been living in her own apartment not far from her parents’ house, is looking forward to living for an extended period in the Austrian capital. “Just the whole feeling of culture and the atmosphere, it’s very special. Where I stay in Vienna, every day I walk past Mozart’s house. When you’re walking past this kind of historical place, it’s just extraordinary. And there’s so much of that in Vienna. I love the architecture, I love the whole feeling of the place.”

Lessons with Schulz are different than those with Bron, explains Hanslip. “Working with him, for example, on the Beethoven Violin Concerto, he has the facsimile manuscript and so I can see what Beethoven wanted, the different markings, what he scrubbed out, the phrasing, and so on.”

Is Schulz changing her technique? “No, not really. There’s the occasional, ‘try to swing a bit more, you’ll get a much louder sound and you won’t have to work so hard.’” But she’s quick to credit Schulz for her more assured and personal style of playing as of late. “I think that I study things a bit more, and while I still do things instinctively and spontaneously, I have also thought about the general line and the phrasing and general dynamics.”