Chalk and cheese, you would have thought—the century's most cerebral violin concerto (any other offers?) with virtually its most un-cerebral (virtually, because Oistrakh on Harrnonia Mundi is coupled with the Kabalevsky, beside which even Khachaturian sounds complex). Still, as performances they both have a real claim to serious consideration.
The Schoenberg is not a piece one would expect Soviet violinists or orchestras to be well acquainted with (how many westerners are?). But for that very reason it is likely to be prepared with special care, as I'm sure it has been here. A badly misread chord in bar 31 of the first movement (1'12'') suggests otherwise, but this proves to be an isolated mishap. And although the soloist looms unrealistically large, her prominence is no greater than on many western recordings and not detrimental to musical sense. In fact, llana Isakadze strikes an admirable balance between intransigence and pliability and makes a strong, confident sound. The accompaniment does not quite trust itself to react in a chamber music fashion to the grazioso interplay of the second movement and its recorded image tends to change focus periodically. But here too there is little cause for complaint and the nightmarish Mahlerian episode before the finale cadenza is especially effective.
As for the Khachaturian, I am inclined to prefer it to the Perlman/EMI version if only because the orchestral playing is so much more vivid and the recording quality more airy (yes, a little too reverberant, but better that than stuffy and congested). Oistrakh on Le Chant du Monde/Harmonia Mundi, masterful as he always sounds, is given a distressingly emaciated accompaniment. Klimov makes larget outs than Perlman in the cadenza (Oistrakh completely rewrites it) and snips a further bit out of the finale; what I like though is the idiomatic relish he brings to writing which can so easily sound stale. A curious point is the central episode of the slow movement where Klimov is suddenly given an echo-chamber reverberation (or is it actually orchestral violins, Mantovani-style?). Naughty, but nice.'