Following her fine performances of the Second Concerto and the Scottish Fantasy (10/14), Antje Weithaas turns her attention to the evergreen First Concerto, with an account whose freshness and expressive subtleties continually delight. It’s a very different performance from the excellent one recently released by Guro Kleven Hagen. Hagen’s playing is more straightforward, with a powerful sense of narrative, whereas Weithaas gives us more incidental detail. The contrast is clearly seen in the Adagio, where Weithaas’s more leisurely approach, while not neglecting the need to keep an onwards momentum, is concerned to give each phrase its own expressive character. She’s helped by an especially well-balanced accompaniment, with Hermann Bäumer concerned throughout that countermelodies are clearly projected while giving a varied, always convincing character to the overall sound.

The four-movement Serenade is a pleasing, tuneful work, somewhat similar in design to the Scottish Fantasy. But, lacking the Fantasy’s charming local colour (apart from the opening Nordic melody), the later work is much less memorable. There are some beautiful sections, most notably perhaps the last movement’s coda, which provides an unexpected, meditative conclusion. As in the other recording I’m familiar with, by Salvatore Accardo and the Leipzig Gewandhaus with Kurt Masur (1978), it’s very well played by soloist and orchestra. Weithaas misses something of Accardo’s Paganini-like dash in the finale but her wide palette of tone-colours imparts a more alluring atmosphere to the preceding ‘Notturno’.

In memoriam, an extended adagio movement dating from 1893, does succeed in recapturing something of the memorable quality of the First Concerto, with its powerful, solemn character that eventually finds resolution in a consolatory ending. As with the other performances on the disc, it benefits from Weithaas’s thoughtful, committed playing and fine orchestral sound.