Ever since Christian Li burst upon the scene in 2018 as the youngest-ever winner of the Menuhin Competition’s Junior Division, much emphasis has been placed on his identity as a prodigy. The Australian-Chinese violinist was only 12 when he signed with Decca Classics two years later and he now unveils his third album on the label, following accounts of The Four Seasons (10/21) and Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto (9/23) with his hometown orchestra, the Melbourne Symphony. Yet alongside a technique that is astonishingly advanced and consistent for a musician his age, the teenage Li conveys a sense of heartfelt connection on this all-Tchaikovsky programme – a quality not always in reliable supply even from the most seasoned of violinists.

Following the pattern of his previous Vivaldi and Mendelssohn albums, Li presents a cornerstone of the repertoire in a context that offers delightfully fresh illumination of the familiar. Here, Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto is framed by a set of miniatures drawing attention to the balletic and folk-tinged aspects of the finale in particular, as well as to its lyrical pathos.

Serving as a kind of prelude is a pair of arrangements for solo violin and orchestra of dances from, respectively, Swan Lake and The Nutcracker (from which Paul Campbell has created a prismatic, violin-centric transcription of the Waltz of the Flowers). Somewhat curiously, the three pieces that follow the concerto are chamber miniatures for violin and piano – with Nicola Eimer as Li’s sensitive partner. They make an especially winning duo in the Op 34 Valse-scherzo, an 1877 piece written before the Violin Concerto for Yosif Kotek, the violinist/love interest who provided Tchaikovsky advice on the latter. The Valse sentimentale and Nocturne (No 4 of the Op 19 Six Morceaux, more usually heard in its cello-orchestral transcription) underscore a note of tender melancholy that attracts keen attention from Li in his account of the Violin Concerto itself – and not only in the Canzonetta.

Li, who has been mentored by Robin Wilson and David Takeno, recorded the Concerto immediately after his Royal Liverpool Philharmonic debut with the work in October 2023. The violinist’s unjaded, youthful intensity blends attractively with the experience and authority Vasily Petrenko brings to the piece. (Jascha von der Goltz conducts the two orchestral miniatures, recorded a few months later.)

Without resorting to flashy novelty or idiosyncrasy, Li takes an essentially straightforward approach but makes a mark through his tonal confidence, clarity of gesture and, most tellingly, unwavering focus on communication. The recording neatly balances his cantabile warmth with the delectable Liverpudlian winds. A tendency towards excessive rallentando for emphasis may still betray the violinist’s youth, but on the evidence of his playing here, Li already possesses the qualities needed to ripen into an artist of substance.