Transcription often allows music one knows well to be heard in new or different contexts – think of Busoni’s reworkings of Bach, for example, or Respighi’s of Baroque-era lute pieces – but less often to restore a work to what might be imagined as its original sound world. That is what Yan Huichang and Ku Lap Man have attempted in their recent reorchestration for Chinese traditional instruments of the evergreen Butterfly Lovers violin concerto, retaining only the original solo part, radiantly played here by Joshua Bell. The concerto was composed in 1959 using a traditional Western classical orchestra by two students at the Shanghai Conservatoire of Music, Chen Gang and He Zhanhao, to mark the 10th anniversary of China’s Communist regime. It has been recorded many times (by Gil Shaham and, at least four times, by Takako Nishizaki) in its original guise, and also in arrangement as a concerto for piano or the traditional instrument, the zheng. This new recording closes the circle for possible formats.

For many, its soaring melodies and overtly romantic profile – based on a traditional Chinese folk tale with overtones of Romeo and Juliet – will appeal unreservedly; for others, and I count myself as one, its saccharine atmosphere may make it rather too much of a good thing spread across the 27 minutes of its seven sections (played without a break). That said, the transcription is adroitly laid out and Bell and the Singapore Chinese Orchestra under Tsung Yeh are as persuasive a set of advocates as one could wish for. Sony Classical’s sound, produced and engineered by Adam Abeshouse in late summer 2018, is first-rate.

I am less convinced about the efficacy of the three couplings, virtuoso standards of the Western classical tradition, transcribed for an accompanying Chinese orchestra. That said, Eric Watson’s of the Méditation from Thaïs is so sensitively done – and Bell’s playing so compelling – that one hardly notices the accompaniment anyway. In the Saint-Saëns and Sarasate works, the traditional instruments do provide an Asian twang to the sonorities, most curiously perhaps in Zigeunerweisen’s breakneck finale, a Sino-Magyar mash-up that does not really come off.