Britten’s own recording of his Violin Concerto with Mark Lubotsky towers over the field but that has not stopped others rising to the challenge. Among recent recordings Anthony Marwood and Maxim Vengerov have most noticeably widened the parameters: Marwood, with Ilan Volkov urging him on, puts in a performance as grippingly tense as any, while Vengerov, with Rostropovich slowing him down, offers beautiful playing at expansive tempi.

These two new recordings place themselves centrally. James Ehnes is a very fine violinist and there is barely a moment here when his playing is anything but silken in tone and sinuously refined (try the elegance as he rises into the stratosphere at the start of the finale). Kirill Karabits and the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra make cultured colleagues but there is not much danger in their ostinato rhythms or edge to their attack. Ehnes also sings in a blue sky through the elegiac passages, where Britten’s recording taps into the ominous ‘perilous sweetness’ that would later pervade Death in Venice. The performance by Livia Sohn on Eloquentia is more difficult to pin down. Sohn’s playing feels more immediate, partly thanks to the soloist being given a closer balance, and it is shot through with angst and urgency – but her conductor, Luigi Piovano, sometimes lets the tension sag and the playing of the Orchestra del Teatro Marrucino di Chieti is as clumsy as it is characterful.

The couplings help to make the choice easier. Ehnes gives us another highly skilled performance in Shostakovich’s First Violin Concerto. Sohn adventurously offers Jonathan Berger’s Jiyeh, premiered by her in 2007 and a complementary work in addressing the theme of pacifism, but the score sounds loosely written after the Britten and hardly compelling. The top recommendation still has to be Lubotsky and the composer on Decca. Among recent rivals, Marwood and Volkov on Hyperion display a hotline to Britten, closely followed by the recent Chandos release with Little and Gardner.