In recent years Gil Shaham has taken up the cudgels for the music of a decade which, he would argue, yielded more great violin concertos than any other. His ongoing series of (mostly) live recordings began with an attractively packaged multi-disc instalment (Canary Classics, 4/14). Vol 2 consists of just two works, recorded in the studio and accompanied by generous documentation. Curiously, perhaps, he has chosen pieces already in his discography.

If the 1930s saw a resort to older archetypes and a drive to communicate urgent truths to bigger audiences, Shaham is certainly up for that in the 2010s. It’s there in his engaging stage manner too; just a pity he is prone to relegating his accompanists to the middle distance. This being an own-label project one must assume he actually likes the microphone placement in the Prokofiev concerto. Here the intimacy of the music-making – The Knights are a modestly sized orchestral collective from Brooklyn – has been compromised by a cavernous acoustic in which woodwind solos come through well enough but string lines don’t make their proper impact. The slow movement, taken a little deliberately for my taste (and a long way from Jascha Heifetz’s quick-fire conception), suffers most. Key countermelodies are rendered well-nigh inaudible. André Previn’s LSO is a more tangible presence in Shaham’s tauter, more conventional, less sinister 1995 account.

With the Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra under Stéphane Denève replacing Pierre Boulez’s formidable Chicagoans in the Bartók, the boot is on the other foot. I was anticipating a performance a little different in tone, lighter and freer. Speeds are indeed faster overall, the mood feistier, while the soloist’s glorious old-school sonority ensures that lyrical moments are never undersold as they can be with today’s more insistently innovative interpreters. The recording, credited to SWR, sounds well enough. One final oddity is that the CD requires the volume to be set rather lower than usual.