Johan Dalene’s Nielsen Concerto was, to some extent, a known quantity. The young Swede won the Nielsen Competition in 2019 with a performance that proved he had the measure of a piece it’s notoriously difficult to get the measure of – technically and aesthetically. This outstanding recording shows a degree more confidence and some tonal and technical refinements but no sense of polishing up; Dalene’s Nielsen remains as fresh, plain-dealing and stimulating as it was in 2019. His recording is up there with those from Vilde Frang and Cecilia Zilliacus, my top recommendations in a recent Gramophone Collection (4/19). Dalene’s account might well pip even those.

There is character here at every turn – in momentary appoggiaturas or portamento (unequivocally ironic), in an extraordinary parade of temperaments (Nielsen’s lazy layabout pops up as often as his choleric upstart), in the gameplay of the final Rondo scherzando in which Dalene is every bit a cartoon-character match for Storgårds’s cunning RSPO and in a consistent sense of vernacular directness that reveals the work’s roots; it’s difficult not to think, in Dalene’s second cadenza, of Nielsen the fiddler improvising a solo in his father’s wedding band. And yet, somehow, Dalene always sounds like himself – in his distinctive, delicious and very present savoury tone (never revelled in for its own sake) and in his ability to fix a point on a horizon and play, unhurriedly and with a sense of purity, towards that point.

That pays spectacularly in Sibelius’s Concerto, and an Adagio molto imbued with a sense of tenacious calm that appears to slow the music even as it remains at tempo (for a change, that tempo is as marked). Elsewhere Dalene’s highly distinctive phrasing draws attention to all sorts of linked patterns and shapes in the composer’s unique syntax while never distorting the line or seeming incongruous – as though Dalene’s distinct ideas about phraseology have come to him in the moment, entirely naturally (that is particularly so in the finale, where his insect-like high-register work around 5'00" suggests a different sort of smile). Even in that movement Dalene is technically capable but not drawn into flaunting it virtuoso-style – so aesthetically on-point for Nielsen but bringing a refreshing edge to Sibelius’s Concerto, whose relationship with the idea of ‘display’ is more complicated. For my money, there’s no finer coupling of these highly contrasting yet much-associated concertos on record. I suspect the individual performances could well prove superlative for many listeners, too.