There’s an urgency to David Nebel’s performance of Stravinsky’s Concerto I’m not sure I’ve heard in this work before, even in Patricia Kopatchinskaja’s intensely physical account (Naïve, A/14). It’s not merely a matter of tempo, either. Hilary Hahn (Sony, 1/02) takes the opening Toccata at a gallop, yet her approach is coolly Apollonian while Nebel seizes on the solo part’s changeability. Listen right at the start to those crunching opening chords, then the confidential purr when he takes up the melody (perhaps in homage to Samuel Dushkin, the Concerto’s dedicatee, who purrs similarly in his 1935 recording with the composer conducting).

Nebel taps deeply into the music’s darker elements, too. The young Swiss violinist’s reading of the third movement (‘Aria II’) begins with a spasm of grief like something out of a Greek tragedy, and he sustains this air of anguish through the subtlest shades of despair and desolation, all of which makes his romp through the finale an especially manic release. Kristjan Järvi and the Baltic Sea Philharmonic follow suit with gusto – try starting at 3'40" where the exquisite duet between soloist and concertmaster turns into a madcap race.

There’s urgency in the opening movement of Glass’s Concerto, as well. Indeed, Nebel seems to constantly be nudging forwards, almost straining to break free from the orchestra’s relentless rhythmic regularity. He and Järvi take the second movement considerably slower than the metronome mark – if not quite as lugubriously as Capuçon and Davies (Orange Mountain, 5/17), thankfully – finding an ache that Kremer and Dohnányi (DG, 10/93) miss, though the music itself is ultimately more atmospheric than emotionally involving. Yet again, Nebel really digs into the finale, though here he’s let down by the recording, which places the LSO a bit too far in the background, muddying some important orchestral detail. Still, this is a tremendously impressive debut album, and the Stravinsky performance is among the very best.