It is often asserted that today’s violin stars lack the personality of their famous forebears. Then again the projection of an instantly identifiable sonority matters less than it used to. No slouch when it comes to old-fashioned bravura, Lisa Batiashvili favours an interpretative line that is easier to experience than to describe, not self-effacing so much as intimate, flexible, unhurried. One technical idiosyncrasy is the delayed onset of vibrato on sustained notes, yet the music always seems to come first.

The hermetic confidences of Szymanowski’s First Violin Concerto, very much the driver of this latest release, suit Batiashvili down to the ground. Though not a work she played earlier in her career – unlike Nicola Benedetti, who famously triumphed with it as BBC Young Musician of the Year, committing it to disc while still in her teens (DG, 6/05) – she makes the piece her own through the subtle shading of her sound, an ardently singing line and a refusal to exaggerate. Even when venturing into the stratosphere Szymanowski’s ruminations feel at once dreamy and purposeful. The lustre never dims except where it’s meant to. Typically Batiashvili unleashes a grittier timbre at the approach of the cadenza, after which Yannick Nézet-Séguin and his Philadelphians contribute one last technicolour splurge. We then return to the nocturnal world and an ending that might be construed as coquettish as well as mysterious. Throughout, the impressionistic interplay of soloist and orchestra is beautifully realised in the dry acoustic of Philadelphia’s historic Academy of Music.

The Szymanowski is virtually standard repertoire these days, which is not to say that many renditions go as well as this. Meanwhile Chausson’s Poème would seem to be making a comeback: Batiashvili is perhaps a more natural exponent of its fin de siècle sensuality than the forthright Hilary Hahn, who included it in her yellow-label ‘Paris’ collection (DG, 3/21).

Batiashvili’s concertante picks are framed by scores for smaller forces, not something that would have happened in an earlier age. Any account of Franck’s much-recorded Violin Sonata has to balance classical serenity and Romantic excess. Here the Georgian-born pair adopt a freewheeling approach. The launch of the turbulent Allegro movement is a bit of an agogic jumble and there are a couple of spots in the improvisatory third where Batiashvili’s vibrato-lite keening compromises otherwise flawless intonation. No syrup, then, but I found myself missing the tighter focus of Kyung-Wha Chung with the late Radu Lupu (Decca, 9/80). The Jascha Heifetz arrangement of Debussy’s ‘Beau soir’, appended as a sort of encore at the end of the programme, has Nézet-Séguin taking over at the piano. Young Giorgi Gigashvili is a prizewinning beneficiary of Batiashvili’s own non-profit foundation.

Was ‘The French Connection’, or something like it, too close to the aforementioned ‘Paris’ to be considered as an album title? Batiashvili herself attempts to justify the slightly cloying choice of ‘Secret Love Letters’ in a booklet that comes adorned with a portrait of the artiste in chic and sheer eveningwear. There are a number of informal session photos, too; nothing featuring the composers, not even Szymanowski, the most plausible secret letter-writer of the bunch. Strongly recommended.