According to FHM, she is one of the most beautiful women in Britain - but who would want to be violinist Vanessa-Mae Nicholson? Her childhood lost to incessant practice, her adolescence spent perpetually touring, she cuts an odd, vulnerable figure. She even speaks, at this one-off show, in a peculiarly stilted way. Is she reading from an autocue? Even her self-deprecating lines, such as "I wasn't aware I was responsible for bastardising classical music," come across as Royal Family-style laboured humour.

But Vanessa-Mae has recently been rattling the bars of her cage, searching for a route out of classical that won't appal audiences who have paid nearly £30 apiece to hear their favourites. To that end, she is hedging her bets tonight. Vanessa-Mae is backed by both the Royal Philharmonic and a rock band, the two groups crammed together so closely that the stage is a panorama of flailing elbows. There is somehow also room for a didgeridoo, an instrument that doesn't feature often enough in live music. The suggestion is that the former child prodigy is navigating between nightclubs and the conservatoire - perhaps erring on the side of the former, to judge by her distressed jeans and pink top.

But despite the electric violin that she whips out for a cover version of the 1970s prog-rock track Hocus Pocus, Vanessa-Mae isn't ready to give herself entirely over to the devil's music. Mostly, she finds a middle way between highbrow and lowlife with "dance-inspired" numbers from her new album, Choreography.

They are unequivocally lovely. "Slow, soft and sweet" is her description of Roxane's Veil, and she's right: its similarity to the theme from the 1970s TV series Lassie is enough to make some of us covertly snivel. Despite its name, Emerald Tiger is a spaghetti-western romp to which Vanessa-Mae adds lugubrious seasoning; Havana Slide is as it sounds, inspiring a wolfish character in the row behind me to scream "Salsa!". So she's bastardising classical music. Is that really so bad?