As strong a contender as any for top digital rating in this most communicative of twentieth-century concerto masterpieces, forthright and confident, with energetic support from Salonen and his orchestra. Philips’s engineering sounds like a digital upgrade of Mercury’s Living Presence technique: instrumental imaging is startlingly immediate, the sound stage is very well defined and the bottom end of the spectrum has enormous power, the bass drum especially. Mullova’s playing is committed and intense, with a ripe tone (evident from her first entry) and some filigree passagework in the second-movement variations, where Salonen is careful to clarify every bejewelled strand in Bartok’s scoring. The first movement is well thought through, though the timing exceeds Bartok’s own (as printed in the score) by some three minutes. Still, most rivals are similarly expansive, and the second movement is actually a few seconds faster than prescribed, which is perhaps one of the reasons why it works so well. The finale is again clearly focused, but the big surprise comes with the inclusion – or, rather, the substitution – of Bartok’s rarely heard original ending, where the soloist retires and the orchestra alone shoulder the whole of the coda. (Mullova took the same option at last year’s Proms.) The CD annotation makes no specific reference to this ‘surprise’ finale.
The Stravinsky concerto is another winner, with pert outer movements (the LAPO brass are alert but refreshingly unaggressive) and a ravishing account of the second “Aria”. Tempos are well chosen, the sound is again first-rate and I would rank this performance of the Stravinsky higher than any digital rival. As to the Bartok concerto, Zehetmair and Fischer offer less tonal lustre but more in the way of interpretative daring, while Rattle (with Chung) is marginally more attentive to instrumental minutiae. As I suggested earlier, Mullova is on a par with the best and Philips’s demonstration-worthy sound-frame may well persuade readers to make her recording a first choice.'