Ingrid Fliter departs from her beloved Chopin for her latest disc on Linn. As on her Chopin concertos, she is partnered by the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, this time with Antonio Méndez at the helm. The use of natural horns and trumpets in the orchestra gives it a very particular hue, which is used to great effect, not least in Mendelssohn’s Fair Melusine overture, in which Méndez relishes the contrasts between the serene and the impassioned.

The Mendelssohn concerto suits Fliter particularly well, and she’s alive to the impetuosity of the outer movements, as well as to the work’s more poetic elements. Others may be still speedier, not least Jean-Yves Thibaudet in his long-admired recording, but Fliter’s command of the drama is second to none. She seizes the music by the scruff of the neck in her very first entry, which has a pleasing muscularity to it, even if Howard Shelley finds greater clarity in the semiquaver passagework that follows. Deftly judged details abound: just sample the cheeky wind interjection (tr 5, 4'35") or the brass fanfares (6'34") just before the close of the movement, which fade to give Fliter the limelight as she leads into the Andante – a passage that she judges to perfection. Stephen Hough is also very fine here and I particularly like his flowing tempo for this movement; by contrast Shelley and Thibaudet are both more expansive. Fliter chooses a middle ground and her quiet ardency is very compelling.

In the finale she lets rip, yet never at the expense of clarity (though I do wonder whether her sforzandos at the tops of phrases, eg from 1'30" in tr 7, slightly impede the flow. In her hands, though, the Tempo 1 section that takes us to the end of the concerto is splendidly effervescent.

It seems to be a bumper couple of months for the Schumann Concerto, with new accounts from Hough and Dénes Várjon (see page 36) and now Fliter. Febrile is the word that springs to mind, and the entire concerto is all about reactivity (as you’ll hear from the off). The wind acquit themselves with great style and personality, and the sense of an intimacy of chamber music-making is everywhere apparent. Yet I do find Fliter can be too interventionist in terms of rubato, particularly in the Intermezzo, and for me it’s Shelley who really captures the spirit of this movement. In the finale, Fliter is less inclined to toy with the tempo than Hough, but, for a one-in-a-bar feel, Várjon and Melnikov are both captivating. Recommendable particularly for the Mendelssohn, and wonderfully warmly recorded.