A veritable compendium of Sibelius’s writing for the instrument closest to his heart. There’s the big one, of course, but the smaller pieces rarely surface in our concert halls and they are what give this disc an advantage over its many rivals. One of those rivals demanded my attention in these very pages quite recently and that came from the great Dutch violinist Janine Jansen and featured the other great Norwegian orchestra – the Oslo Philharmonic – under Klaus Mäkelä (Decca, 7/24).

It is fascinating how an artist’s temperament can transform the very nature of a familiar piece and cast it in a quite different light. Where Jansen was all fire and sinew – a force of nature – James Ehnes, though robust enough, is all poetry and refinement. His is a smaller, more modest voice in a rugged, often forbidding landscape. He and Edward Gardner are a meeting of minds and sensibilities, the solo part set more naturalistically in its orchestral context (the balance in the Jansen/Mäkelä version is super-immediate). The orchestral detail, both accompanying and soloistic, is ear-prickingly ‘present’, revealing inner voices too often covered in recordings of the piece. Ehnes is at one with the landscape in the Adagio, tender and melancholic, and his dancing in the finale is lighter on its feet than is sometimes the case. It isn’t a solo performance of spectacular pyrotechnics, thrills and spills – its tone is more muted than the viscerally exciting Jansen – but it has other virtues: namely a quiet reflective nature.

The rest of the disc is a complete delight. It is so affecting the way Sibelius embraces a refined folksiness in his six Humoresques. They dance and muse most charmingly and the Andantino of the fourth of them is especially lovely in its filigree ornamentation. Ehnes plays it exquisitely. So, too, the Two Pieces – or ‘Earnest Melodies’ – where he and the Bergen Philharmonic replete with harp lend the soulful ‘Cantique’ a lofty tone. ‘Devotion’ is a song without words. The title and spirit are one. Just gorgeous.

The Two Serenades should also be heard more often. Gardner and the orchestra’s sensitivity is especially striking here: the ethereal way that the soloist emerges from forest murmurs in the first of them (as oblique as only Sibelius can be) and the remote beauty of the second alternating with an agitated dance – a close relation of the Violin Concerto finale.

The three-movement Suite was among the very last works to be completed before the composer effectively fell silent. Given their chronology they seem slight and inconsequential – sweetmeats, even encore material, the third of them ‘In the Summer’ a racy vivace over pizzicato strings tossed off by Ehnes and his colleagues with great aplomb.