Of all the pictures of Nicola Benedetti that have been cheering up newspapers and magazines since she was named BBC Young Musician of the Year last year, there is one that sticks out. It has all the elements we have come to expect: abundant shiny hair, double-espresso eyes, violin.

But this was not taken in a photographer’s studio or during a performance. Instead the backdrop is a primary school classroom and the little girl gazing down the strings cannot be more than six years old.

In the intervening years, Benedetti’s bowing arm has improved and she has graduated from a child’s quarter-size instrument to a hugely valuable 254-year-old Guarneri. The concentration and focus, however, remain the same.

Just a decade or so later, the serious little girl from West Kilbride has grown up into a teenage prodigy, a virtuoso or a violin vixen, depending on whether you read BBC Music Magazine or the Daily Star. Her £1m deal with Deutsche Grammophon puts her in the same stable as industry heavyweights such as Bryn Terfel and Placido Domingo; the label describes it as the biggest deal in classical music for 25 years.

Her Deutsche Grammophon debut, released on May 9, is a curiously contradictory product. It is in many ways a serious piece of work. It features the Szymanowski concerto, all but forgotten until Benedetti played it in the final of the Young Musician competition, as well as pieces by Saint-Saens and Chausson, names which would confound a Classic FM listener, never mind a Daily Star reader. There is also a new arrangement of a Brahms song and Fragment for the Virgin, a short piece written especially for Benedetti by the contemporary composer Sir John Tavener.

Not, in other words, a safe collection from the well-kent end of the violin repertoire. There is neither a tune from an advert nor a classical arrangement of a Cole Porter song in sight. Although the cover features Deutsche Grammophon’s serious yellow logo, it is superimposed on a photo of Benedetti, her face half-covered by her violin, her appearance as polished as her priceless instrument.

Inside, a booklet features more lush pictures of Benedetti, sleeve notes which do their best to demystify Szymanowski and Chausson, and a chatty biography. Then there are details of how to get your official Nicola Benedetti ringtone and a page of gushing thank yous from the star which, more than anything else in the 12 glossy pages, remind you how very young she is.

On the whole, however, it seems to fit with Benedetti’s avowed intent to make a serious career of playing her violin. Unlike other child prodigies or physically blessed musicians, she is playing a long game, taking risks and avoiding some of the more obvious elephant traps.

Does anyone, for example, remember anything more about the last foxy violin player Vanessa-Mae than her white instrument and matching wet T-shirt? Charlotte Church has become more famous for smoking Marlboro than singing Mahler. The Pop Idol runners-up G4 have shown there is a huge market for classical-ish arrangements of familiar tunes. Benedetti is far too well brought up to say what she really thinks of all these options — yuk.

She admits to enjoying dressing up and has good taste, an excellent stylist, or both. If the occasion demands it, she wears a slinky, but not distracting, evening dress. When it doesn’t, she wears a vest top, like every other 17-year-old girl. But she keeps her belly button to herself.

She seems comfortable in her own skin, happy to pass the credit for her good grooming on to her Italian mother Francesca. There are, she has discovered, pros and cons to being easy on the eye: it makes it easier to get noticed and grab headlines while simultaneously inviting everyone to speculate that you are primarily eye candy, instead of a gifted musician who just happens to be gorgeous.

“If there are two musicians of the same level and one is attractive, critics will always go for the other one, because they’re seen to be more serious,” she said recently. Of course, this just makes her more determined to be twice as good.

Aware that the “classical babe” route is not appropriate, Deutsche Grammophon is promoting her as “a role model for youth”. This is much more to her taste. Despite growing up in Ayrshire with parents who prefer the Bee Gees to Beethoven, Benedetti was exposed to music at school and started playing the violin aged four. She knows this is a far from typical experience and Benedetti has joined the Sargent Cancer Care for Children Practice-a-thon which takes her to secondary schools across the country.

“People talk so much about how classical music doesn’t interest children, but it’s this sort of talk that’s actually causing the problem,” she pronounced after one school visit.

“When you tell kids it’s uncool, they won’t be confident about playing.” She hopes, in her own small way, to change that.

But she has a more important lesson to teach this star-struck, Heat-reading generation: that there is an alternative, fully-clad route to fame. That putting in the hours of practice and championing the work of an obscure Polish composer can lead to magazine covers and million-pound record deals. That talent plus hard work is a more reliable route to long-lived fortune and success than appearing on Big Brother.

It is not the easy option and if Szymanowski does not sell, Benedetti may well be pushed towards Beatles songs and bikinis. There is every sign she will resist. Let’s hope she does not have to.

Child prodigies who led the way

Sir Yehudi Menuhin: the original child violin prodigy, Menuhin played at Carnegie Hall at the age of 11. When he was 13 Albert Einstein cornered the young musician backstage in Berlin and reportedly told him: “Now I know there is a God in heaven.”

Vanessa-Mae: the Singaporean beauty was a guest soloist with the London Philharmonic, she toured with the London Mozart Players and recorded her first classical album all before she reached her teens. She is also fluent in five languages and an accomplished skier.

Nigel Kennedy: Kennedy was Menuhin’s most famous protégé. He studied at the Menuhin School and then the Juilliard School of music in New York. Credited with popularising Vivaldi’s Four Seasons.

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