A HIGHLY accomplished violinist from Bolton who started playing the instrument at the age of just seven and went to perform across Europe has died.

Professor Jennifer Nuttall-Wolf died in Bolton Royal Hospital, aged 81 on May 23.

She made her first concert appearance at the Whitworth Hall, Manchester in 1956, performing Mozart’s 5th Violin Concerto with Sir John Barbirolli at the age of 16.

The great conductor was said to have predicted a wonderful future for the young violinist.

Jennifer learned to play the violin with Martin Milner, future leader of the Hallé Orchestra, at his home in Tonge Moor when she was seven. She went on to win an open scholarship to the Royal Manchester College of Music at the age of 14.

Her family said: "She told friends 'I began to play when I was seven years old because I guess I was jealous of my elder brother playing the violin. My music had to compete with my burning interest in horses and show jumping. But my lessons at Danesbury Road with Martin Milner, leader of the Halle, settled it. They were a wonderful family. Martin was most inspiring and Mrs Milner gave me tea before every lesson'.”

The girl from Chorley New Road went on to perform in Scandinavia, Switzerland and Germany with symphony orchestras, chamber orchestras and on Swedish Radio.

After a 1956 solo performance of Mendelssohn’s Concerto in E for Violin and Orchestra, a critic reported, “Miss Nuttall, who has the youth, skill and spark of unusual emotion to become a leading concert figure, was magically untroubled by the technical demands of the concerto and, best of all, she displayed a beautiful tone, consistent in complete range in the slow movement.”

In 1959, as ‘Soloist Diploma with Distinction’ from the Royal Manchester College of Music she joined Swedish Radio in Stockholm, performing and teaching in the 18th century castle which became the Edsberg Institute of Music.

In Sweden she married her former tutor Endre Wolf, the world-famous Hungarian violinist, whose appointment to the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra in 1936 was said to have probably saved him from the German death camps.

Between 1979 and 1983 she was a professor at the Norwegian Academy of Music in Oslo and from 1984 lectured at the State College of Music in the University of Lund.

In 1989, she flew back to Lancashire from Sweden to be welcomed at The Bolton Festival as ‘a daughter of Bolton’ for a solo performance in the Bolton Library Theatre.

Jennifer and Endre frequently played together in later professional careers, often in concerts of works by Bach, Bartók, Sibelius and many others.

She returned to her home town of Bolton not long after the death of her husband Endre in 2011.