It’s amazing how the character of a performance can reveal itself in just a couple of bars. Renaud Capuçon is plainly a seasoned romantic when it comes to the Sibelius Concerto and the warmth he exudes both in phrasing and sound in his delivery of the rapt opening theme belies the forbidding landscape. The midnight sun burns brightly. His reading is rich and impassioned more than it is gritty and elemental and his expansiveness opens up more and more breathing space to reflect and to emote.

It’s all very beautiful – the slow movement, for instance, making capital of Capuçon’s alto-like tone; dark and searching, a yearning nostalgia. But even the finale’s rustic dancing might benefit from a little ‘roughing up’. I miss the wildness that Janine Jansen (in her recent disc with Klaus Mäkelä) brought to the piece.

The Barber, however, is another matter – a genuine meeting of temperaments between soloist and composer. I’ve always loved the way in which the work opens: it’s as if we’ve arrived in the piece mid-sentence, so to speak, the orchestral piano lending an air of intimacy – a sophisticated drawing room perhaps – to the proceedings. We have fast-forwarded to Barber’s opera Vanessa. This lush sophistication is all-embracing. That dreamy tune in the slow movement does a Brahms and blissfully upstages the soloist. Even the cellos get a bite of it before he does. When he does belatedly take it up, though, it’s well worth the wait. Daniel Harding really milks the orchestral writing (in a good way) and it probably adds something to the mix that the Orchestra de la Suisse Romande carry so much nostalgia with their legacy of recordings. Good to hear them again in such fine fettle.

I tend to agree with Iso Briselli – the work’s intended originator – that the fast and furious finale feels like an add-on, a last-ditch attempt to deliver some all-out virtuosity for the soloist. Capuçon obliges. But as brusque afterthoughts go it isn’t about to erase the memory of that slow movement.