Hot on the heels of Baiba Skride’s exhilarating account of Britten’s Violin Concerto comes this one from Isabelle Faust in Munich with the Bavarian Radio Symphony on superb form; it is coupled with the earlier works for violin and piano plus premiere recordings of two fascinating little pieces for violin, viola and piano written by the 16-year-old schoolboy in 1929, which are very rewarding in themselves. To find another recording released within a month of Skride’s studio version rather underlines the point that this powerful score – not much recorded before 2000 – now seems to be getting under the skin of today’s leading international players with remarkable frequency, most recently Ehnes, Frang, Hadelich and Skride.

Faust has impeccable credentials when it comes to the central 20th-century repertoire and she sails into the opening of Britten’s Concerto with serene confidence and instant stylistic empathy. A fascinating aspect of this disc is the focus on the Catalan violinist Antonio Brosa (1894-1979), who gave the Concerto its premiere at New York’s Carnegie Hall in 1940 with John Barbirolli. Both the Suite, Op 6 (1936) and the concert study Reveille (1937) were also written for Brosa, and there are vivid and virtuosic qualities in the writing that inescapably seem to reflect the personality which emerges clearly in the Concerto. With pianist Alexander Melnikov as luxury casting, these are definitive performances in beautiful sound from Berlin’s Teldex Studio.

In the Concerto, Faust digs deep and her tone has a visceral immediacy that goes straight to the heart of the music. She is unafraid and unflinching, and vividly unleashes the passion in these pages with mesmeric power, symbiotically partnered by Jakub Hrůša. Faster and more frightening than Skride in the demonic ‘dance-of-death’ Scherzo, Faust also seems tauter in the moving Passacaglia finale. The tension of a live performance genuinely registers – there are moments here when I was on the edge of my seat – and the finale’s climax is completely overwhelming, its denouement insistently gripping. Not since Mark Lubotsky’s classic 1970 Decca account with Britten at the helm in Snape Maltings have I felt such naked intensity in this great work – but Faust’s sheer emotional commitment and musical finesse, as captured in stunningly integrated sound by the Bavarian engineers, now takes her right to the top of my modern tree.