I missed Christian Li’s debut album for Decca (he became the label’s youngest-ever signing in 2020), warmly welcomed by Mark Pullinger (10/21). Watching him play on YouTube videos, he has the musical maturity and technical wizardry of someone twice his age, in addition to which he has a charming stage presence, able to convey to an audience the joy involved in what he is doing. Right from the opening bars of his second album, here is playing that goes straight to the heart.

The programme is one that may cause you to wonder, as I did, why more artists don’t offer a mixed bag like this. ‘On Wings of Song’ is accompanied by harp (Yinuo Mu) and chamber ensemble; there are a ‘Venetian Gondola Song’ arranged for guitar (Xuefei Yang) and violin, four works for violin and piano, a concerto, and a Bach aria in which the vocal solo is taken by the solo cello. Apart from providing an entertainingly varied listen, it allows us to hear in full measure the impressive credentials of this latest violin prodigy (born Melbourne 2007).

If the first track puts a smile on your face, the second will leave you grinning from ear to ear – a very good arrangement for violin and piano by one Abram Yampolsky (no info given, nor of the other arrangers who have contributed) of the Rondo capriccioso. To hear it in this unfamiliar garb is so completely convincing that you question why it has not been done before. Perhaps it has. Schubert’s ‘Serenade’ (the one from Schwanengesang, not ‘Hark, hark, the lark’) arranged by the great Mischa Elman and the once-hackneyed ‘Spring Song’ follow, played with a beautiful tone and a carefree zest of which many an older fiddle player would be proud. The same can be said of this programme’s centrepiece, the Concerto.

If this is the introduction to the work for Li’s generation and the legion of fans he will attract, then they are fortunate indeed, though he will find in it more expressive depth and greater intensity in the future. The Bach aria may seem an odd choice with which to follow, but it works well even if that awkward harmonic clash towards the end between the violin and cellist/vocalist is rather pronounced here (5'21"). Mozart, though, in the form of his two-movement E minor Sonata, for me sits uncomfortably here when we’re supposed to be ‘Discovering Mendelssohn’, even accepting that ‘musical prodigy’ is this album’s secondary leitmotif.

I have to report the presence (source unidentified) of someone’s noisy inhalation in some quieter passages of the Bach, concerto and elsewhere, the sound of a soft palate hitting the back of the throat and which has all the characteristics of snoring. Wings of Song it ain’t. That aside, if there is a Gramophone newcomer award next year, this must be a front-runner.