Lawrence Foster is one of the best concerto accompanists in the business and almost always manages to impart freshness and character to such well-travelled soloist/orchestral terrain as the works on this vibrantly engineered SACD. Notice, for instance, the robust, focused trumpet section in the Grieg Concerto’s first movement, the full-bodied lower strings that particularly come to the fore in the slow movement’s climaxes, and the finale’s crisp woodwind chording (why, however, is the first chord clipped?). Similarly, Rachmaninov’s Second Concerto features such compelling details as the first-desk flute soloist’s prodigious breath control in the Adagio sostenuto and excellent delineation of the Allegro scherzando’s fughetta (although not quite up to the crackling specifications of Katchen/Solti and Rubinstein/Reiner).

For her part, pianist Sa Chen thankfully eschews the attention-getting phrase elongations and foreground/background vagueness that spelt disaster for her previous Chopin collaborations with Foster. She projects the rolling passagework and multi-layered textures of the Rachmaninov’s first movement with plenty of power and sweep, although her bland, directionless playing throughout much of the aforementioned slow movement leaves the conductor holding the expressive bag, so to speak. But her entrance in the Allegro scherzando pales besides the thunderbolt impact and speed with which Richter/Wislocki and Zimerman/Ozawa pin your ears to the wall, while her swirling passagework is suave and accomplished without matching these pianists’ incisive, pointed standards. In and of itself, Chen’s well-modulated, regulation pianism does justice to the Grieg Concerto’s solo part but she offers little that her recorded competitors have not done better. For example, her generalised articulation of the animato e molto leggerio first-movement sequences lacks Murray Perahia’s specificity and her dynamic eruptions in the first movement cadenza are sectionalised rather than connected like Howard Shelley’s, not to mention Arthur Rubinstein’s 1961 finale, with its captivating combination of tonal refinement and joie de vivre. Certainly collectors seeking this particular coupling on SACD won’t be disappointed, yet the catalogue competition speaks for itself.