Zukerman, with his own chamber orchestra, gives a surprisingly Classical reading of this concerto, not just on a consciously intimate scale but simple and fresh in style of phrasing, and particularly clean and refreshing in the superbly articulated finale. The acoustic is relatively dry but very apt for such a performance. Mendelssohn's other masterpiece on this disc, given in Zukerman's own version using varying string forces (keeping solo strings for the slow movement), makes an attractive coupling. The CD package seems to have lost the note from the recording producer which JOC rightly questioned in her review of the LP about the surprising speeds for the slow movement and finale of the concerto—the one fast, the other slow. They are surprising but both are apt.
But the finest and most characterful CD version of the Mendelssohn Concerto (coupled with the Tchaikovsky Concerto) remains the Chung on Decca.'