Vanessa-Mae
British violinist
Vanessa-Mae (Chinese: 陈美; pinyin: Chén Měi; born 27 October 1978), also called Vanessa-Mae Vanakorn Nicholson, is a Singaporean-born British violinist and skier with Thai heritage from her father. Her album sales reached several million by 2006, making her the wealthiest entertainer aged under 30 in the United Kingdom at that time. She is known for fusing classical and popular genres, which she calls "violin techno-acoustic fusion". This crossover style combines her classical violin training with electronic music influences like techno and synth-pop, as seen for example in the title track from her album Storm from 1997.
As a skier, she competed under the name Vanessa Vanakorn (Thai: วาเนสซ่า วรรณกร, romanized: Wa-nes-sa Wan-na-kon; her father's surname) for Thailand in alpine skiing at the 2014 Winter Olympics. She was initially banned from skiing by the International Ski Federation (FIS) after participating in a qualifying race allegedly organised to enable her to qualify for the Winter Olympics. An appeal to the Court of Arbitration for Sport led to the ban being nullified, citing lack of evidence for her own wrongdoing or any manipulation. The FIS later issued an apology to her.
Musical career
Vanessa-Mae made her professional debut at age ten at a music festival in Germany. At age thirteen, she became the youngest soloist to record both the Beethoven and Tchaikovsky violin concertos, according to Guinness World Records.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 7, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q215076. VIAF identifies the subject as 115758017. The Library of Congress control number is no96009958. 5 of 7 selected statements include explicit references; 3 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1978, 2006, 1997 and 2014.
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This entry incorporates text from “Vanessa-Mae” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.