Last year I welcomed a Philharmonia recording of Beethoven’s Triple Concerto under Santtu-Matias Rouvali (7/24), where, as I wrote at the time, Nicola Benedetti’s playing struck me as ‘sounding silvery-clean’. Now Benedetti takes centre stage for an equally silvery and absorbing account of the Violin Concerto under Nicholas Collon that opens with timpani that are quietly impactful (though hardly piano), while in the first tutti the strings lack rhythmic focus. But it’s a fresh, lively sound that holds one’s attention.

Benedetti’s first entry is swift, weightless and agile, landing as it does on the softest of pianissimos, the effect at once both virtuosic and ethereal. Thereafter characterful winds are set against Benedetti’s brilliant bow work (7'36"). Decca has captured the orchestra’s mobile yet rich bass line with great clarity. At 9'51" and beyond the soloist is often quiet to the point of near-inaudibility, and yet because her overall approach is so lively the work emerges as a genuine dialogue rather than ‘holier than holy’ as is, or was, so often the case. Excellent bassoons make a vivid impression, and from 11'36" the performance is profoundly reposeful.

Then Benedetti goes solo. At 18'28", an extended timpani roll leads to a cadenza (concocted by Benedetti and Petr Limonov) based approximately on the one that Beethoven wrote for his piano version of the concerto, where the timpani motif is prominent and Benedetti makes a decorative exit, which works beautifully. The Larghetto is soft-grained and chaste, the orchestra providing the solo fiddle with a warm backdrop. At 4'34", note the expressive impact of Benedetti’s quivering bow – quite unlike the expected vibrato. The Rondo’s opening is well balanced and rhythmically clean, and this time the (much briefer) cadenza is by Benedetti and Wynton Marsalis.

By sheer coincidence this appealingly transparent recording arrived 99 years after the work’s first microphone recording by Fritz Kreisler (made in Berlin under Leo Blech), which has been reissued in a magnificent Mark Obert-Thorn transfer by Pristine Classical. My intention by this reference is not to recall the ‘good old days’ with a nostalgic, all-too-familiar sigh but to encourage a comparison of like with like – Kreisler’s magnificent first-movement cadenza, where he plays the principal themes in multi-stopped counterpoint, so different to adapting the piano cadenza, which is ‘unviolinistic’. Kreisler caresses the concerto; he’s all heart, whereas Benedetti opens history’s trap door and lets the work fly off ready to be rediscovered. The ploy works – she’s a lovely player, intelligent too – but I know which version I’d rather live with.