Winner's career goes down the dumper. Whether last year's winners, Franz Ferdinand, will be able to buck this trend remains to be seen, but past experience suggests not. Gomez, Pulp, PJ Harvey, Badly Drawn Boy, Talvin Singh, Roni Size/Reprazent, Portishead, M People, Suede - the Mercury Prize roll of honour is littered with artists whose careers subsequently suffered a precipitous decline. It's probably too soon to tell if Ms Dynamite and Dizzee Rascal will follow suit, which leaves just the inaugural winners Primal Scream as the survivors of what appears to be pop's poisoned chalice. Even today she still admits to being unable to relax when performing. "Relax? I'm petrified." It's not all bad - Mullova met her husband, the cellist Matthew Barley, at the Proms, when he came to congratulate her.Mullova has recently been working with Barley's jazz-fusion ensemble, Between the Notes, on a project with Gloucestershire young musicians, which they'll bring to the Proms on "Violin Day" They'll play Knots, a jazzy, syncopated piece by Trainer. Was it awkward picking up the violin after eight months? "For the first few minutes.

And it was painful, because the callouses on my fingers had gone. But otherwise it was easy." Born in Moscow in 1959, Mullova became an sensation after defecting to the West in 1983. Critics remarked on her extraordinary technique, but also her coolness She remembers it as sheer terror. It was the first time she'd taken a break since she was four-years-old.

"I wanted to travel, and to connect with my children," Mullova explains Mullova is back. She has made a CD of boisterous Vivaldi concertos (Onyx 4001) and her first commissioned violin concerto, for the living, by Fraser Trainer, has its Proms premiere on 30 July. His biblical paintings brought him before the Inquisition for trivialising religious subjects.. Last year, the violin virtuoso Viktoria Mullova made the decision to step off the international concert treadmill and take a sabbatical, resolving not to touch her 1723 Jules Falk Stradivarius for a year. Whether he is painting biblical, Christian, pagan or allegorical subjects, the mood is always courtly He can certainly do vast panoramic pageants. They are usually grand and sexy, dream-like and half-comic, peopled by heavy, sleepy, slightly helpless figures, who are often leaning weightlessly at an angle, dressed in a loosely thrown piece of fabric that is just about to slip off their naked bodies. His most distinctive works are domesticated versions of classical myths, usually tales of love.