There are many points of contact between Peter Eötvös’s Third Violin Concerto Alhambra (here receiving its premiere recording) and Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring: the juxtaposition of mysticism and physicality, the long-breathed and the animated, the exotic and the balletic.

The Alhambra Palace is front and centre the motivating image of Eötvös’s piece – the fusion of Spanish and Arabic influences, the location and historical resonances – but beyond the musical cryptograms so beloved of Eötvös and in this instance derived from A-L-H-A-M-B-R-A and indeed the names of the works dedicatees, Isabelle Faust and Pablo Heras-Casado, it’s the ear-catching colour and light that draws one in, the shimmer and exclamatory punctuations of percussion, the sinuous and enticing solo lines permeated as they are with curvaceous arabesques. Eötvös is a painterly composer and in that regard its ‘Frenchness’ is inescapable. Poulenc might have shadowed the solo violin with mandolin, as Eötvös does here, and the Orchestre de Paris clearly recognise kinship when they see and hear it.

It’s that seductively French quality that Heras-Casado and the orchestra point up so provocatively as the tropical flora of The Rite’s Introduction are, as it were, ‘revealed’. There is much beauty in the fabulous constellation of winds winding and intertwining like a time-lapse film of evolving plant life. Ritualistically, spiritually, Heras-Casado is ‘in the zone’ here. The ‘Mystical circles of the young girls’ and ‘Ritual of the ancestors’ convey a mysticism out of time and space. The still-centred moments of this performance are the moments in which you stop and take note.

But the age-old problem with The Rite in this age of super-proficiency among orchestras is that it rarely sounds – and certainly not here – on the edge of possibility. The implicit shock and awe of Stravinsky’s tempo contrasts need to feel risky, and here, at almost every turn, they are a whisker away from that sensation. The savagery feels dialled down. Even as the ‘Dance of the Earth’ roars in like the flare of a meteor coming to ground, the precision of the Orchestre de Paris is possessed of a cleanness that precludes the edge-of-seat terror of derailment. I am trying to remember when I last felt that in this piece.

But the Eötvös is well worth basking in. The Rite may be muted and in no way a best-in-field ‘library’ choice but it definitely has a point of view.