Close-up: Alina Ibragimova

Clubbing, rapping... there is more than one string to this young violinist's bow

Slim as a pin and pretty as a buttercup, Alina Ibragimova doesn't look like the sort of violinist to challenge musical orthodoxy. Yet the 22-year-old Russian has championed forgotten masterpieces, silenced Shoreditch clubbers with unaccompanied Bach, won the respect of rapper Lethal Bizzle, and directed some of the world's leading chamber orchestras. "I do find myself being the youngest musician or the only girl, but it doesn't really matter," she says. "It becomes more of a collaboration."

Ibragimova took up the violin aged four. Both her parents are musicians, her mother a violinist, her father a double-bassist with the London Symphony Orchestra. Early training in Moscow, then stints at the Menuhin School and Royal College of Music exposed her to varied influences: though a founder of the Chiaroscuro Quartet, who perform classical music with historically accurate instruments, she sticks to modern violin for Bach. "I find more freedom, more colours," she says. "But some day I'd love to play them on the baroque violin."

After the success of her recording of Hartmann's Concerto funèbre, penned as a mournful commentary on the Third Reich, Ibragimova is to play Brahms's C Minor Piano Trio at the City of London Festival ahead of her debut with the Australian Chamber Orchestra and the release of her second Hyperion disc: a recording of Nikolai Roslavets's Second Violin Concerto. Another work written in the shadow of totalitarianism – is there a theme here? "No," she says, "I just play anything I find interesting. Every time you approach a work you do it differently. And it is never boring."

Listen to Alina Ibragimova perform Bach's 'Partita No. 4 in D minor'

Alina Ibragimova will play the City of London Festival on 24 June: St Vedast Alias Foster, London EC2 (0845 120 7502, www.colf.org).