Leila Josefowicz gives an effective shape to the Concerto’s soliloquising first movement where Maxim Vengerov creates a more powerful but more generalised impression. Her tone is fully projected in Birmingham’s Symphony Hall, even a little unwieldy, with an affecting catch – even a healthy wobble – that brings Itzhak Perlman to mind, or George London in Boris. Only in the Scherzo is there some want of weight, but she has wisely kept her powder dry for a stern account of the Passacaglia, in which Warner’s engineering allows the progress of the ground bass through the orchestra to stand out with baleful clarity. The point at which the clarinet shades the edge of the Passacaglia’s climax shows a deep and mutual understanding between Josefowicz and Oramo. The cadenza sets out with classical restraint, only gradually intensifying towards glassy yowls and sheets of chords that are not a million miles distant from a Hendrix solo. It’s the high-point of a thoughtful and thoroughly modern conception of what is, after all, one of the few orchestral works to trespass on the private confessions of the composer’s chamber work.

The small rhythmic and intonational irregularities of Josefowicz’s playing in concert are absent from a terrific studio account of the much later Violin Sonata. Placing the two works side by side illuminates their similarities more than their differences, even if their eventual trajectories reach different goals (manic exuberance in the concerto, bleak nihilism in the sonata); John Novacek registers a pedal point at 12’08” in the finale’s Passacaglia with just the precision that the CBSO basses articulate a similar moment in the concerto’s opening Moderato. Among young, Western performers, Daniel Hope (Warner, 6/06) brings a tougher rhetoric to bear, but Josefowicz does more than hold her own with a coupling that is unique.