How do young players deal with the generation gap between themselves and their audiences?

There are very few professions in the world where, from a very young age and for the rest of your career, you’re high-velocity entertainment for people mostly over the age of 55 or 60. I remember attending and performing concerts as a kid in Canberra; compared with school and home life, this social environment was alien territory. From a child’s perspective, anyone older than your parents is “pretty old”, and it was The Pretty Old who were almost exclusively the attendees at my pre-teen lunchtime recitals. These experiences as a budding young violinist gave rise to an awareness – by no means a negative one – of the age gulf between myself and my listeners.

Meeting and talking with enthusiasts in the audience has become second nature. At an age when I was mostly interested in Jurassic Park and Nintendo, I was surprised to find all sorts of non-dinosaur-related common ground between spotted youths (it was a long time ago!) and septua/octogenerian strangers, whether it was non-musical (cricket, Marx Bros films, how irritating the weatherman on the local news was), or musical: a shared admiration for...