The thirty-something Moscow-born virtuoso Ivan Pochekin has been a peripatetic recording artist. There’s a locally popular Melodiya album of duets with his violinist brother Mikhail but it is his recording of a completion of Paganini’s Fifth Concerto (Naxos, 3/13) that has enjoyed the widest international exposure: Pochekin had won first prize in the 2005 Third Paganini Moscow International Violin Competition. Now appearing on a German label, though still employing an avowedly Russian orchestra, venue and sound engineer, he faces stiff competition on rather different musical turf.

The less familiar Second Concerto proves the most persuasive. Pochekin gives the music extra breadth and more insistent vibrato than Christian Tetzlaff, rising to considerable heights in the central Adagio, where his exposed line pierces the gloom with the right kind of sweet stratospheric radiance.

The First Concerto feels genuine too – up to a point. Both the opening Nocturne and the rapt Passacaglia move a tad more swiftly than some will like, closer to older Soviet norms than the exaggeratedly dreamlike or brawnily expressive takes to which we have lately become accustomed. Several violinists, not this one, have started playing the finale’s opening theme themselves, the composer’s original intention before David Oistrakh suggested that the soloist required a break after the cadenza. For Pochekin’s account the main bugbear is the closeness of the miking, occasionally imparting a certain shrillness. Meanwhile the clarinettist turned conductor Valentin Uryupin’s timbrally explicit Russian National Orchestra inhabits the shadows of the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory, a balance familiar from those venerable Soviet LPs of Oistrakh and Leonid Kogan. Not that the masking of significant orchestral detail is among the ‘authenticities’ to which the booklet lays claim.

I can’t pretend this Profil pairing dislodges the likes of Maxim Vengerov from the top of the digital heap. With Mstislav Rostropovich on the podium, it was as if we were obliged to confront the plight of the individual voice in the face of mass terror. What Pochekin and Uryupin proffer is confident music-making.