This sort of compilation, I have to say, doesn’t appeal to me. To collect together music by similarity of mood denies the play of contrasting emotions so important to all the composers featured here, and tends to encourage us to use music lazily, as background rather than something actually to listen to. But one must acknowledge that Sarah Chang’s sweetly expressive style sustains the interest well (apart from an occasional tendency to overdo the emotion, in the Gluck and the Paganini Cantabile, for example). Some parts of the sequence, too, like the excellent Milstein arrangements of Chopin and Liszt, follow on really effectively. The Andante from the Symphonie espagnole, a strong performance from both violin and orchestra, is another outstanding item.
To take out a segment of Vieuxtemps’s carefully integrated single-movement structure, however, means losing a large part of the music’s sense and impact, and whilst the Tchaikovsky Canzonetta is more self-sufficient, to make the orchestral transition at the end lead, not to the concerto’s finale, but to the Saint-Saens, is to my ears ridiculous. And the Vitali, an inappropriately grandiose rearrangement and orchestration of Ferdinand David’s nineteenth-century arrangement of the original, brought no pleasure at all.'