Kyung Wha Chung's bright, alert and intense reading comes over the more incisively on CD. The fullness of the Montreal orchestral sound is established in the few seconds before the soloist enters, with a clean and weighty bass effectively balancing the brilliance at the top. The violin solo then sounds rather too aggresively bright in the upper register, for Chung's tone is here not fruity in the way that Perlman's is on DG. The solo instrument is balanced forward but not so markedly as on the DG recording. Though the Perlman version may have more sparkle and flair, Chung's is strong and dramatic too, and has a more generous, even rarer coupling in the brief Saint-Saens concerto, which finds Chung rather more loving than in the Lalo.'