If Tchaikovsky became the ‘uncrowned composer laureate’ of Imperial Russia, as Richard Taruskin so persuasively argues, surely the G major Concerto is one of the pieces that qualified him for the accolade. It is no accident that George Balanchine’s 1941 choreographic setting of the work was titled Ballet Imperial. Longest of the three piano concertos, elegant, grand and expansive, small wonder that some of the Second’s finest recordings (and there have been many: Hough/Vänska, Pletnev/Fedoseyev, Postnikova/Rozhdestvensky and Gilels/Kondrashin among them) run the affective gamut from extrovert to epic-heroic.

Eldar Nebolsin’s new recording, in collaboration with Michael Stern, music director of the Kansas City Symphony, here conducting the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, takes a decidedly different approach. In contrast to more stentorian accounts, Nebolsin opts for a reading that is refreshingly mellow, almost intimate and, above all, profoundly lyrical.

Throughout the concerto, as indeed in the alternately playful and wistful Concert Fantasy, Nebolsin’s unwavering focus is on the shape of the phrase, inflected with the most delicate rubato. Stern and the New Zealanders mirror this rhetorical flexibility with great skill and subtlety. The canon passages between right and left hands, so characteristic of Tchaikovsky, never sound repetitious but emerge as true dialogues. The concerto’s second movement, given without Siloti’s cuts but observing Tchaikovsky’s at the very end, is especially atmospheric. Nebolsin’s chordal accompaniment of the final violin-and-cello duet (9'08") is a gossamer filigree. The finale has a fleet Mendelssohnian or perhaps Litolffian lightness that is quite effective, heightening the overall golden bravura of the concerto.

If the recording has an Achilles heel, it is the distant and perhaps poorly placed microphones, which rob Tchaikovsky’s rich orchestral textures of their full brilliance and detail. But if a marred sonic presence places the recording at a disadvantage, Nebolsin’s refined and bracingly original readings of the Concerto and Fantasy complement some of the most compelling.