His publicist is in defensive mode when I arrive. “David [rarely will you meet someone bearing the name who is so clearly not a Dave], you gave me just an hour’s notice and it was a Thursday night.” In response there’s the shrugging off of a jacket, leaving broad, bare shoulders exposed, and the raking of a hand through dirty-blonde hair: “But I had this totally hot babe hanging on my every word and the place she wanted to go to was Mr Chow [the Knightsbridge restaurant]. When you couldn’t get us in, she bailed on me.” So saying, the classical violinist with the rock star looks leans forward to examine his face, from a variety of angles, in the dressing room mirror (it seems to meet with his approval).

“Sounds like a nice girl,” I think to myself, hovering in the doorway of this West London photographic studio as the dialogue unfolds. But David Garrett isn’t really put out, nor his PR in trouble: it’s kind of a given that some other hot babe will happen along in a minute. For even in this age of sex selling everything, the Radio 3 playlist included, it’s unusual to find a performer so secure in their own sheer gorgeousness as this 26-year-old. Here he is now, wheeling round to view digital images from the ongoing shoot. “You look great,” it occurs to me to say by way of introduction, having stepped forward to peer over his shoulder. But no. The words would be redundant. He simply isn’t in any doubt.

Not that there’s an unpleasantness about him: Garrett is intelligent, says his Pleases and Thank Yous, knows when to deploy a winning smile. But he also radiates the confidence of one who is used always to being the focus of whichever room he is in, this because he is both extraordinarily talented and also a bit (OK, a lot) of a head-turner. How perfect, then, that while studying under the great Itzhak Perlman at Juilliard in New York, he supplemented his income and fed his ego by modelling for print and runway, twice being booked for Fashion Week, on one occasion by Giorgio Armani.

“I enjoyed it,” he says of the whole clotheshorse experience. “There were an awful lot of very beautiful women around, which is something I’m always very enthusiastic about [here he gives a man-to-man wink]. And because no one knew what I did and they all looked on me as just another face, it was very flattering. I found I liked getting attention for me as a person, not just for the violin. Plus, having been used to being on stage from an early age, it wasn’t a problem for me to connect with a lot of people. I’m not shy and found the work easy and pleasant.” And its legacy is the practised way in which he interacts with our photographer, constantly throwing shapes. “Good?” he asks several times, but rhetorically.

The descriptive shorthand most often used by those reporting on the phenomenon of the younger Garrett was, inevitably, “child prodigy”. Sixteen years on from his public performance debut, his upper lip curls derisively on my repetition of the words. “How I hate that term,” he says, between mouthfuls of salad. “It makes it all seem happy, light and effortless. But the fact is no one would buy a ticket to see a child play if they knew what was happening behind the velvet curtains. To say you would is to be ignorant of the sacrifices required. It’s to overlook the way in which they’re pushed by their parents and tormented by their teachers. It’s to deny the mental fallout from so much pressure at too young an age.”

A kind of slavery, then? “In a way. Sometimes more so, sometimes less. What I’m saying is that I’ve met an awful lot of fantastically talented young musicians, but that I have never ever met a prodigy. Of course, they each had the innate talent and physical ability. But it’s no accident that they also have that ease on stage, that huge memory capacity for the music, and the mind-to-hand coordination. They have all those things precisely because they’ve been encouraged to be driven and disciplined throughout their short lives, in a way that is not always healthy for them.” And Garrett is not speaking purely objectively. When he describes his own boyhood, the word that springs most readily to mind is “Childline!”

Born in Aachen, Germany’s most westerly city, to a lawyer father and his American wife (“Trusting in my talent, they made the decision early that I should use my mother’s surname professionally, it being so much easier to pronounce”), he first picked up a violin aged 4. By 5, he was being taken across the border to Holland each weekend to study with his first teacher. By 7, and for the next 3 years, the commute was to the north German port of Lübeck and a different tutor (“A 6-hour journey on a Thursday evening, then the same home again on a Sunday night”). By 10, he was performing with the Hamburg Philharmonic and by 12, had signed to Deutsche Grammophon (DG).

“Unlike my brother, two years my elder, I didn’t go to a normal school but was home-tutored. That, and the fact that I was travelling so much, meant that I didn’t have anyone to play with, didn’t have friends, was pretty much isolated from peer company. To start with and because it was all I knew, I didn’t complain. Only when I was older and began to compare my life with what appeared to be the normal childhoods of those around me did I start to take issue. Looking back, there was a tremendous amount of pressure on me, but I’ve grown out of wanting to make my parents feel guilty. They know themselves they made a million mistakes and we’re reconciled. If I lived in the past, I couldn’t have fun today.”

Garrett admits that his father had himself entertained dreams of being a violinist. “It sounds so stereotypical, doesn’t it? But I wouldn’t say he was living vicariously through me. I think he – they – just thought I had a talent which should be progressed, and that a musician’s life would be good for me.” Over time, however, an increasing awareness of his own gift brought a degree of self-confidence. “I didn’t like to fight with my dad, but here was someone trying to tell me how to play a passage – ‘Use a wider vibrato. More bow! Less bow!’ – when he couldn’t do so himself. I soon realised I was superior to him. I’d probably been superior from the age of 6. It was inevitable there’d be differences of opinion.”

Meanwhile, and to offset the costs of tutelage/travel, there were concerts (as many as 90 a year and all over the world, from South America to Russia) and those recordings for DG. “I suppose it was only fair,” he says of this. “They [his parents] didn’t want to pay for it all out of their own pockets.” But coinciding as it did with his own entry into adolescence, Garrett found the schedule simply too draining, too demanding. “Because in addition I was having to practise for seven or eight hours a day at a time when my body was growing… I made mistakes physically and for a period of about four years was pretty much in pain when playing. That took any last fun away. I almost came to despise the violin.”

Ironically, though, one celebrated name after another was speaking of his potential greatness. Said the conductor Zubin Mehta, “I’ve watched David’s development from the age of 11 and he is surely going to have a resounding presence in the musical world of the 21st century.” And the violinist Ida Haendel, one of his tutors during this time: “He’s a wonderful player with excellent technique and natural musicianship.” Yehudi Menuhin, with whom he played when just 12: “His performances are totally wonderful.”

But more even than growing pains, it was the issue of control – of who had it – that was responsible for Garrett’s unhappiness.

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