Augustin Hadelich’s performance of Brahms’s Violin Concerto abounds with subtle detail. Listen, for example, to the way he digs into his first phrases, showing tensile strength and sinew, then how little by little he softens and sweetens his tone leading into his first full statement of the main theme (at 4'29"). Hadelich has a sure sense of that vital Brahmsian ebb and flow, too. Indeed, his and Miguel Harth-Bedoya’s sense of tempo and pacing are sensible as well as sensitive throughout.

In this age of historically informed practice, I’m tempted to describe this as a resolutely traditional interpretation. There’s a pleasing heft and mellow warmth to the Norwegian Radio Orchestra’s sound, although they heat things up when the time is right – try, say, the first movement’s molten central development section. The finale is notable both for its rhythmic swagger and for Hadelich’s exceptionally articulate playing.

Hadelich has written his own cadenza, and perhaps it’s the novelty, but I think I prefer it to Joachim’s. It’s brilliant yet serious and stylistically echt. Note how he slowly ratchets up tension, setting up the touching moment where the second theme floats in alt and unadorned.

The Ligeti Concerto is also given what might be described as a traditional reading, particularly if you’ve heard Patricia Kopatchinskaja’s ferocious account – Gramophone’s 2013 Record of the Year (Naïve, 12/12). Hadelich moves easily through the solo part’s vertiginously shifting rhythms and herky-jerky accents, always seeming to reach for the long line. His propensity for finding lyricism in unexpected places doesn’t mitigate any of the music’s visceral thrill, although he is somewhat let down by the orchestra; the NRO are very good but not nearly as confident or as characterful as Eötvös’s Ensemble Modern for Kopatchinskaja or Boulez’s Ensemble Intercontemporain with Saschko Gawriloff (DG, 1/95). The quartet of ocarinas in the Aria movement sounds almost normal here, for instance, not like an alien invasion, as on the other recordings.

Still, Hadelich has an final ace up his sleeve by using Thomas Adès’s cadenza at the end – and, man, it’s a doozy. Slyly humorous, acutely dramatic, jaw-dropping in its technical demands, and ultimately satisfying, both in the way he brings back ideas from previous movements (as if desperately tying up loose ends) and in creating a seamless segue that makes the abrupt falling-down-the-stairs coda feel inevitable. You’ve got to hear it.