Click here to download Tasmin's recording of Bach's Gavotte

Click here to listen to Tasmin's introduction to the piece

Even down the phone, Tasmin Little exudes righteous indignation. “It’s a smokescreen!” she exclaims. “This notion that classical musicians are all snooty, and that our snootiness creates a barrier that stops people enjoying what we play. By doing what I’m doing I want to prove once and for all that the only reason why people don’t sample classical music is that they don’t have open minds, or they are lazy.”

What she’s doing is revolutionary. Arguably Britain’s leading violinist, she spent last weekend recording a new album, enticingly titled The Naked Violin. But instead of flogging it in the conventional way, through the internet or good old record shops, she won’t be flogging it at all. Instead, she is making it available from Monday – after a manic week of editing – for anyone to download from her website (www.tasminlittle.net) free of charge.

“This is a first for any performer, classical or pop,” she says. “Even Radiohead, who did something similar with their new album last year, had a kind of honesty box. You paid what you thought the album was worth or what you could afford. I don’t even have that. I’m simply asking people to undertake the Tasmin three-step challenge.”

Which is? “First, download the recording. Secondly, write to me at my website, saying what you didn’t like about my chosen music or playing. Thirdly, tell me what barriers still remain that prevent you from entering a concert hall. In other words, what is your problem?”

There shouldn’t be any complaints about the variety of music on The Naked Violin, even though it’s all for unaccompanied fiddle. “I wanted to present little snapshots of styles, to increase the chance that people will enjoy at least something,” Little says.

So she begins with Bach’s Partita in E, with its famous gavotte. “Then there’s Paul Patterson’s Luslawice Variations, a sort of Young Person’s Guide to the Violin, wittily exploring a different colour or technique with each variation. And finally there’s Eugène Ysaye’s completely awesome Third Sonata, which was written in 1924 and inspired by the violin playing of Yehudi Menuhin’s teacher, the Romanian violinist George Enescu.”

Little supplies spoken introductions to all the pieces. And although this might be of more interest to card-carrying classical aficionados than first-timers, the album also offers the chance to compare the sound of two of the world’s finest violins. She plays the Partita on her own Guadagnini, an instrument made only a few years after Bach wrote the piece, while for the Paganini and Ysaye she uses the fabulous Regent Stradivarius lent to her by the Royal Academy of Music.

“It’s my best album yet,” she says. Yet it won’t make her a penny. Quite the opposite. She has invested a lot of her own money, and weeks of her time, in making this nice little nonearner. Why? “It’s not about the money, and it’s not about me,” she says. “It’s about breaking down every possible hindrance to enjoying classical music, and about getting some discussion going about how to make classical music accessible without downgrading the product.”

The concept of The Naked Violin occurred to her while giving a private recital to some Coutts Bank clients and employees. “Some people there thought that they hated solo-violin music, until they actually experienced it. That made me think about tackling these prejudices on a wider scale.” After The Naked Violin is launched on the internet, she plans to tour the project “live” round Britain, hiring a teepee so that she can perform in public spaces that classical music doesn’t normally reach.

She has already done more than her share to bring her instrument to the wider public. Emulating the American violin virtuoso Joshua Bell, who was persuaded by a journalist to busk on the Washington subway and see what the reaction would be (pretty dispiriting; almost everyone ignored him), Little has also tried taking her fiddle onto the public highway – namely the railway arches beside Waterloo station.

Apart from children (one mesmerised tot had to be dragged away), the results were almost as disappointing as Bell’s in Washington: few people stopped to listen to a top-class violinist plying her wares, and even fewer tossed coins into her hat. But Little attributes that to the circumstances. “They weren’t conducive to pleasurable listening,” she says. “Who wants to be under a draughty bridge, looking at birdshit?”

She enjoyed a lot more public response when she mounted her first festival, in Bradford in July 2006 – a five-day jamboree devoted to the early 20th-century English composer Delius. “Delius is hugely underrated, and I’ve always wanted to champion him,” she explains. “I even chose his Violin Concerto to play in a competition once, knowing that I would almost certainly be sacrificing my chance of winning. What makes me most proud about my Delius Festival is that it reached 800 local children over five days, and prompted Bradford Council to establish a music centre called the Delius School, where every child can have access to musical tuition.”

Now she is masterminding another festival with a big emphasis on British music. Called Spring Sounds, it’s based in Stratford-upon-Avon – with plans in future years to link it with literature and visual-arts events in Shakespeare’s town. And she’s also making her conducting debut this year, directing the London Mozart Players in a gala concert at Windsor Castle that will raise funds not only for the Duke of Edin-burgh’s Award scheme but the orchestra itself – yet another sterling arts organisation threatened with extinction by the imminent withdrawal of its Arts Council funding.

“That makes me so angry,” she says. “The London Mozart Players work all over the country. For example, I’m about to go to Hereford, the Lake District, Croydon and Oswestry with them. Who’s going to take professional music to Oswestry in the future?”

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