Another Schumann/Grieg concertos coupling, anyone? After Lipatti, Kovacevich and countless others, what does this new one have to offer? Well, it would be hard to take a brief extract and claim that it shows anything by way of fresh insights. On the other hand, perhaps there is some virtue in a back-to-basics approach that has its sights set higher than detail. And Leonskaja’s delivery is nothing if not authoritative.

Beauty of tone and subtlety of phrasing are not things for which she is most renowned. On a finely voiced instrument such as this one, that isn’t too much of a problem, for most of the time at least. Still, I wouldn’t care to revisit as prosaic an account of the opening phrases of the Schumann Intermezzo as this, and if anything the orchestra’s poetic replies only serve to highlight the soloist’s penny plainness. Nor is the finale free from passages of blatancy and brutality, and I confess to finding her hesitant delivery of the finale’s second theme distractingly mannered.

In Leonskaja’s favour, no one could accuse her of being fussy, preening or over-calculated, and there are times when she communicates a sure sense of the music’s direction. These are presumably the virtues that drew Richter to favour her as a duet partner. That sense of direction helps to give her rubato an impression of purposefulness, of strategic planning – something that superficially more euphonious recordings sometimes lack – as when she allows an extra degree of fantasy into Schumann’s first-movement reprise. ‘Fantasy’ was after all Schumann’s original title for the piece.

I had the misfortune to attend Leonskaja’s performance of the Grieg Concerto in Birmingham some 10 years ago – an occasion that could most generously be described as uncomfortable. The new recording goes some way towards expunging that memory. It is far more accurate, for one thing, and there is an attractive dash and lightness to the first movement’s dancing second theme (if only she had brought a similar quality to the Halling-like main theme of the finale). I also like her initially rather shy approach to the cadenza. Even so, I find much of the nuancing elsewhere unconvincing and ungainly, the fortissimo passages often overblown. For relief I turned my ear towards Michael Sanderling and his excellent Lucerne Symphony.

Not for me, as you may have gathered