Ireland's leading young violinist, Catherine Leonard, is appearing at the ESB Vogler Spring Festival in Sligo this weekend. She talks about the teachers that inspired her, and her intuitive approach to music, writes Michael Dervan

Musical parents are more likely than most to beget musical children. At least, that is the common perception. On the one hand, it could be explained as a matter of nature, of genetic inheritance. On the other, it could also be put down to nurture and culture. Parents familiar with the ways of the musical world are far more likely to make the right moves in the musical education and early career of a child, no matter what his or her particular musicality might be. Conventional wisdom dictates that the thing to do is to start early if you want your offspring to rise to the top of the musical world.

Given her musical history, violinist Catherine Leonard is an unlikely candidate to have reached her current pre-eminence among the younger generation of Irish string players. She began late, and didn't actually start taking lessons until the age of nine, in 1982. She wasn't an active concert-goer. She didn't like practising. In fact, she was in her mid-teens before she finally found herself forced - well, that's the way she makes it sound - to rise to anything more than an hour a day.

As a youngster, she learned both piano and violin, and mostly favoured the piano. When she had to make a choice, though, it was the piano which was dropped. And, as she recalls with quiet surprise, she has hardly touched it since. Then, when she finally moved away from Ireland for advanced tuition - as Ireland's most talented young musicians are still largely obliged to do - she turned down places in London and Utrecht to continue her studies in Dallas, Texas.

"I come from a non-musical background, basically," she explains. "My mom did take piano and violin when she was young. She has a musical ear, I would say; my father maybe not so much, though he's a very appreciative listener.

"I was studying at the Cork School of Music, once a week, and it just gradually progressed. I suppose I showed some proficiency in both instruments, maybe more so piano, because it's easier to progress quickly at the beginning. I never went to concerts, I never was exposed, really . . . it just happened out of the blue.

"I had a great first teacher, Una Kindlon, in Cork. I was entered into the Feis Maitiú after a year, and soon was winning prizes. It's strange, I don't have very many memories of that time of my life. I was looking at a video the other day, of me in a school uniform, playing the Mendelssohn concerto, really badly, although it had something. There were obviously things that needed to be corrected, which I really had to tackle later on.

"It was funny to see. Somehow it's quite a blur for me, that time.

"I didn't really love it. It sounds terrible to say that right now, but I know that I wasn't keen on practising, for sure. But things changed when I was 16-and-a-half, when I went to Mr Masin in Dublin. Then I started having to practise. He put serious pressure on me - I had been doing one hour a day on each instrument up to then, which is nothing. I was having a normal childhood, going to school, taking that seriously.

"I'm glad it worked like that, that I wasn't sent off to the Menuhin School or one of the music colleges in England. Of course, I probably would have developed quicker, I probably would have been doing a lot more, sooner."

Ronald Masin, who's always referred to as "Mr Masin", was the turning point. She remembers getting up at six in the morning, "not every day, though", in order to put the hours of practise in, and feeling the spur of guilt when she didn't get all the necessary work done.

The time issue is still a lively one. When I mention the practice diary of the great Russian pianist, Sviatoslav Richter, who kept a note of time spent, and knew how much practice time he "owed" himself when he fell short, she points by contrast to the violinist Fritz Kreisler. "He had a great attitude. He just said, 'Give the fingers a break.' He would take summers off, completely. I have friends who would be afraid to stay off the violin more than a week or two. I've learned how to take time off, though not a whole summer. It's very healthy for me."

Her attitude is also very healthy to the often unhealthy world of competitions. She went to her first international competition, the Menuhin, in Folkestone, in her late teens, but just to watch, and talk to some of those involved. She was impressed by the technical skills of the younger players, but alienated by what she saw as the conformism which competitions end up imposing - the word "robotic" slips into her description. But she also felt, intuitively, that she had something distinctive to bring into the competitive jousting.

Intuition, it turns out, explains a lot in her world.

"I'm primarily an intuitive player. It's not that I don't consider the background of the music, the how and why of the piece that I'm playing. I do. I definitely do. But I don't dwell on technique, and at the end of the day, inside, I want to feel. I want to understand what the composer wanted, and I want to feel what's right, intuitively."

The intuitive feeling about competitions was sound, and eventually led to third prizes in the Kulenkampff Competition in Cologne, in 1994, and the Scheveningen Competition in the Netherlands, in 1996. She went to both places, she says, in a basically light-hearted way, for the experience.

Competitions gave her a target to work for. This meant that she remained relaxed and cool, and it helped her to play her best. She's quite clear about the fact that although she never found the competitions daunting, she never saw herself as going in to win.

It was intuition, too, which led her to Dallas. Masin had given her discipline, developed a large repertoire in a short space of time, and "opened me up a lot - I was very shy, very inhibited". In Dallas, where she went on a Fulbright Scholarship, she started studying with Emanuel Borok, but changed very quickly to Eduard Schmieder.

Violin teachers have a tendency to deconstruct and, if everything works out, reconstruct the technical approaches of their students. Schmieder "took me apart again, at the age of 19. I remember Ida Haendel in a master class once saying if you're beyond the age of about 16 you can't change the fundamentals again and expect to do well and be able to play. But he took it upon himself to put me through that. I guess he saw something in me that he wanted to develop. He put the work in, and so did I. And one of the things I loved there was the camaraderie between the pupils."

After Dallas, she studied under two of the living legends of the violin world, at the Salzburg Mozarteum - with Ruggiero Ricci, who did so much to put Paganini back on the musical map, and who has one of the largest repertoires of any living violinist, and at the Sweelinck Conservatoire in Amsterdam, under Herman Krebbers, long-time leader of the Concertgebouw Orchestra, and a distinguished soloist as well.

For a player so musically commanding on stage, she mostly presents herself diffidently in conversation. It would be hard to imagine a performer who is less affected with the airs of a prima donna, though behind the unassuming manner there is an unusual type of certainty.

She doesn't seem to take anything for granted, but she knows what she does and doesn't want, and aligns herself accordingly, with a fixity of purpose.

Unlike most of her Irish counterparts, she made a link with contemporary music early on, performing an Ian Wilson commission, from the Book of Longing, in the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, in 1996, and his violin concerto, Messenger, which was also written for her, at the National Concert Hall, with the National Symphony Orchestra, under Gerhard Markson, in January 2001.

She's formed a duo with pianist Hugh Tinney. They've toured abroad as well as at home, and will make their first CD together later this year.

Shehas played in festivals as far away as Australia (Perth), and Canada (Quebec), and has been a regular presence at the West Cork Chamber Music Festival for many years.

This year's appearance at the ESB Vogler Spring Festival in Sligo is her debut there. Tomorrow she plays Ravel's G major Violin Sonata, with Russian pianist Alexander Melnikov, the Brahms Horn Trio, with Bruno Schneider (horn) and Stefan Mendl (piano), and Prokofiev's Cinq Mélodies, again with Melnikov.

If the advance snippet of the Ravel seen on RTÉ's The View last Tuesday is anything to go by, audiences in Drumcliffe are in for a real treat.

The ESB Vogler Spring Festival, at St Columba's Church, Drumcliffe, Co Sligo, runs until Monday 6th. Further information and booking at 079-64202