Let’s get the unpleasantness out of the way first. As an overall concept this album is a mess. Franz Waxman’s arrangement of Enescu’s First Romanian Rhapsody is positioned before the Adams Concerto and sounds like an encore before the main event. Waxman’s Tristan and Isolde Fantasia pushes Wagner towards Cecil B DeMille histrionics, while John Corigliano’s hacked-together Chaconne is episodic and rhetorical and is severely lacking in the material department. Misjudged for certain, and even assured playing like this can’t elevate such dubious programming.

This is a pity because nothing should hide the fact that Chloë Hanslip is the sort of musician every teenager forced to practise their scales dreams of becoming. The richness and clarity of her tone is beyond learning, and she demonstrates such profound empathy for John Adams’s 1993 Violin Concerto that Gidon Kremer (on the premiere recording – Nonesuch, 6/96) can consider himself completely outplayed. This is the sort of performance that secures a reputation for life.

The first movement strikes me as a particular challenge, as an unwinding melodic line generates itself over a quarter-hour span. Kremer plays the notes mechanically but Hanslip deconstructs their meaning and pieces together a cogent narrative direction that’s a bona fide interpretation. The sing-song ballad quality of the slow middle movement unlocks her lyrical imagination, while the tricky moto perpetuo of the violin part zigzags and breakdances across occasional Nancarrow-like rhythmic overlays in an exuberant finale. Assertive and enthused accompaniment from Slatkin and the RPO, too – everybody’s doing Adams the greatest of service.