Sophie Solomon is a classical violinist whose cv includes the National Children's Orchestra, ProCorda, the LSO and techno-klezmer band Oi Va Voi. Right now, she is being expensively promoted as a rising star of crossover world-classical music. You might have seen the odd lifestyle piece about her ("My hols", etc), accompanied by pictures showing her togged out in fashionable gear, clutching her violin.

Her debut album, Poison Sweet Madeira, bristles with celebrity collaborators including Ralph Fiennes, KT Tunstall, Richard Hawley and Marius de Vries. The CD runs a gamut of styles from prog-pomp to tango-lite; it's not particularly inspiring, but its saving grace is that Solomon plays her instrument very well. However, you often wish that she were playing on someone else's tunes.

On stage, where Solomon is backed by bass, drums, keyboards, acoustic guitar and plaintive accordion, the variety of the album is homogenised into one sound. She looks unaccustomed to performing centre stage; her announcements are rushed, occasionally apologetic. When she introduces A Light That Never Dies, a setting of a Russian poem she translated, she says: "Ralph Fiennes is not here, so you've got me." Before rushing into a breakneck Hot Club-style piece called Swing, she explains that she learned the song "from some Gypsies in Budapest when we were playing on an old Russian battleship". There is plenty of speed and adrenaline, but the clattering drums only emphasise a serious flaw in Solomon's music: it doesn't swing. This is not such a problem in the more classically derived pieces, or pop songs such as the attractive Lazarus. But with half the repertoire drawn from "world" sources such as Gypsy jazz, tango and klezmer, the light and warmth of less starry practitioners is conspicuous by its absence.

· At the Glee Club, Birmingham, on Wednesday. Box office: 0870 241 5093. Then touring.