Rebecca Hirsch has won golden opinions for her performances and recordings of mostly contemporary music, and composers have been eager to write pieces for her. With the exception of a well-received account of the Britten Concerto (8/99), this is her first recording of a taxing classic of the violin concerto repertoire, and she seizes it with both hands.

Her technique is fully up to its more hair-raising pages; elsewhere, her palette of tone-colour is beautifully varied and her emotional response to the music is full-hearted but never effusive. Typically it is not the first phrase of the consolatory Bach chorale that draws out her richest tone, but her moved response to the woodwind statement of it. In both movements I thought that if Eri Klas had had a little more patience with the ‘Carinthian’ theme even more quiet magic could have been drawn from it, but that proviso aside this is an account of the concerto that would be no less recommendable if it were at full price.

And the two orchestral works make a highly desirable coupling, of course. Again I found one or two momentary disappointments: a touch of capriciousness lacking from the end of the Lyric Suite’s first movement, a degree of savagery absent from the wilder pages of the second orchestral piece, a slightly ungainly tutti in the third.

These are amply made up for, however, by meticulous clarity of texture combined with a satisfying fullness of orchestral sound and by moments of great delicacy: the Zemlinsky quotation in the Lyric Suite is very beautiful, for example; so is the poetic end of that movement. A pretty warm recommendation, therefore, especially on Rebecca Hirsch’s account.