Music: Siren Songs at Center Stage

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They seem at first to have little in common, the wunderkind and the defector. One commands the stage like a young princess, voluptuous in a strapless designer gown that accents the alluring curve of her shoulders and the luxurious corona of her billowing tresses. As Anne-Sophie Mutter lays her bow on the strings of her Stradivarius, the music swells seductively, and all at once the intoxicating perfume of the theater fills the air. "Music is a form of love, the highest form of love," she says. "It is passion."

The other woman is a tall, slender young spartan in a loose, kimono-like black jacket and pants, her long, lank brown hair pulled back severely, her strong Slavic features firmly set in contemplation of the coming battle. No makeup or jewelry lends even a hint of frivolity to her appearance as she wraps one large hand around the neck of her Strad, tucks it confidently under her chin and prepares to stare down the ghost of Paganini. For Viktoria Mullova, there are no frills in concert, just her, the night and the music. & "I work better under pressure," she says. "I am more concentrated."

Together they make a contrapuntal etude. Mutter, 24, is a child of the prosperous West German bourgeoisie who grew up in a small town near the Black Forest and still returns frequently to visit her family. Mullova, 28, abandoned the gray streets and grayer bureaucracy of her native Moscow in 1983. Yet both women, currently in the forefront of young performers on their instrument, are emblematic of an important development in the world of concert music: the rise and triumph of the female solo violinist.

Mutter and Mullova are just two of the many women violinists of talent and temperament now gracing the world's stages. Korean-born Kyung-Wha Chung, 40, shared first prize in the Leventritt Competition with Pinchas Zukerman in 1967, and has since established herself as a major artist on the strength of her burnished tone and fiery passagework. Chung is a performer of great interpretative range and insight who can light up the night with a blazing Tchaikovsky concerto, probe the intimate, sorrowing mysteries of Alban Berg's twelve-tone essay in the form, or tackle Sir Edward Elgar's king-and-country Violin Concerto with equal aplomb. She also plays in a chamber trio with her sister Myung-Wha, a cellist, and her brother Myung-Whun, a pianist now making a career as a conductor.

The burgeoning contingent of Asian performers also boasts the tiny 16-year- old Japanese prodigy Midori (born Midori Goto), a student of noted Violin Teacher Dorothy DeLay at Juilliard. Midori's robust tone and strong technique -- and her uncanny composure in the face of two broken strings during her performance of Leonard Bernstein's Serenade -- stunned a Tanglewood audience on a muggy summer night two years ago at a Boston Symphony concert led by Bernstein.