I warmly welcomed Thomas Zehetmair’s coupling of these concertos for its careful differentiation of their two contrasting sound worlds, subtly underlined by Sir Simon Rattle’s demonstration of how much chamber music both works contain. Mordkovitch and Sinaisky take a more sumptuously romantic view, the palette warmer, the textures richer almost throughout, thus emphasizing kinships rather than distinctions. The risk is that Szymanowski’s opulence will be emphasized at the expense of his delicacy and fantasy, and the fact that on the whole this is not the case is due very largely to Mordkovitch’s range of tone-colour, from a dreaming, rapt quality to bold eloquence. Sinaisky is more apt than Rattle to go for richly saturated colours with a formidable, window-rattling bass end to the spectrum, but with the exception of one particularly sonorous passage in the First Concerto Mordkovitch has the sheer heft to avoid being overwhelmed – and, as she shows in the molto energico section of the Second Concerto, she does not lose warmth or beauty of tone when really digging into the strings.
Admirably persuasive performances, in short, coupled with a luxuriously Straussian account of the Concert Overture in which, as in the two concertos, Sinaisky shows a fine control of expressive rubato. Just a little of Zehetmair’s and Rattle’s delicacy is lacking, but most listeners will find the added richness ample compensation. The recorded sound has that same quality but, save in the densest tuttis, with no lack of clarity.'