ON THIS SUNNY New York afternoon, Joshua Bell isn't using his Grammy-winning hands to draw out a lyrical line in a Brahms concerto. He's pounding a stubborn bottle of tomato sauce to drown his hamburger and French fries. It's typical. This is a man who's as happy talking about golf ('the swing looks so simple, but it's so complicated, like drawing a sound out of an instrument'), cars (the latest in his collection is a Porsche 911) and computer games (he was a champion as a youngster) with as much enthusiasm as he does Beethoven and Bach.
Bell travels at least 200 days a year - he'll be performing in Hong Kong this weekend - has played with every major orchestra in the world, and records extensively. His virtuoso work on John Corigliano's The Red Violin soundtrack, crossover recordings with jazz musician Wynton Marsalis, collaborations with bluegrass performers - not to mention his athletic good looks - have made him a household name in the US.
Bell doesn't shun contemporary music and has had several pieces written for him by the likes of Corigliano, Nicholas Maw and Aaron Jay Kermis. For his concerts with the Hong Kong Philharmonic this weekend, he'll share the bill with the world premiere of Hong Kong composer Clarence Mak Wai-chu's Voice of the Harbour.
Bell will also play a small work of his own. He is, perhaps, the only concert violinist who regularly composes his own cadenzas - reviving an 18th-century practice whereby performers would improvise their own solos in the middle of concertos to show off their skills. By Beethoven's time, composers had taken over writing the cadenzas.
'One day, I was fooling around with the Brahms concerto and a few themes began to form,' Bell says. 'I thought to myself, 'I almost have a cadenza. Why not go for it?' So I wrote this for the Brahms, and later for Mozart, Haydn, Gershwin, Bernstein. I simply enjoy writing it and playing it. I'm simply sparked by the piece. This doesn't mean I'm a composer - yet.'
Bell was born in Bloomington, Indiana, in 1967. His parents were both psychologists. At the age of four, he was given his first violin. 'As a child, I took the violin for granted,' he says. 'The same as I took eating and sleeping and sports for granted. It was part of my life, nothing more. About the age of 11, I went to summer camp and heard recordings of Jascha Heifitz. That's when I realised that violin playing had a deeper meaning than merely enjoying the sounds. So, I decided to make it part of my life.'