‘These are not good times for the [Sibelius] Violin Concerto,’ says conductor Jukka-Pekka Saraste on a video at the probing Sibelius exhibition currently showing at Helsinki Town Hall. ‘Ideals of playing have changed.’ Saraste’s point is that the concerto’s necessary stillness and tenacity elude most soloists these days. I wonder what he would make of Baiba Skride’s recording, which might be a world away stylistically from Ida Haendel’s performances but has something of her unfettered sense of peace, inevitability and, yes, tenacity.

We know Sibelius’s revision of the concerto reined in the score’s virtuoso tendencies. We also know a little about the violin the composer was gifted by a seafaring uncle and its sweet, tight sound. Skride’s own sound is notably sweet and tight, and her general demeanour in the concerto more shamanistic than heroic. She doesn’t have a great deal of power, particularly down low, but she has astonishing purity, accuracy and clarity. The first Allegro breathes patience, particularly in those circling and patterning passages that draw excitable, breathless playing from others (Batiashvili, Vengerov).

That lack of power means Skride can’t quite weigh the slow movement down like Haendel did, but the engineers meet her halfway in a recording that’s more floating than rooted. Skride has no fear of the movement’s inbuilt aimlessness, which more than compensates. She occasionally struggles with the quick, intricate demands of the finale – there are two slips in the opening sequence – but still that patient weave, that unfettered limpidness, is there. Santtu-Matias Rouvali makes more sense of the concerto’s oddball final bars than most. Together, Rouvali and Skride find the ideal footing for the Two Serenades, particularly the latter. The orchestra’s veiled tone is like a velvet cushion for Skride’s ribbon of sound, frequently devoid of vibrato – often fragile, always delicate.

Skride approaches the Nielsen Concerto with much of the same care, but that’s really not the name of the game in this piece. The opening cadenza is nowhere near abrupt enough and when Nielsen’s japes kick in, it all sounds like a Victorian parlour game compared with Vilde Frang’s copious musical dynamite. There’s a whiff of sentimentality in Skride’s tight vibrato at the end of the Largo which doesn’t fit the aesthetic, and in the ensuing Allegro cavalleresco (which is on the slow side) the orchestra is all smoothness too; surely the score suggests it’s attempting to cajole the soloists on to a different course?

The same qualities that make Skride’s Sibelius create a gorgeous Poco adagio in the Nielsen, the soloist finding a wonderful sense of space (try the exchanges with the brass from 3'44"). But in the Allegretto scherzando that rounds the concerto off with increasing mischief, politeness once more gets the better of both soloist and orchestra. Put Skride’s cadenzas next to Vilde Frang’s and you see how the two temperaments of these outstanding violinists contrast so sharply. Frang’s cadenzas, all spiky and impish, are in Nielsen’s image. Skride’s, delicate, earnest and smooth, aren’t.