Filmed at the 2015 Baden-Baden Easter Festival, this concert will mainly be of interest to followers of Isabelle Faust, whose 2010 recording of the Beethoven and Berg concertos with Abbado and the Orchestra Mozart (Harmonia Mundi, 3/12) won golden opinions and a number of awards. Faust’s trademark features are once again on display, in particular a sound that is spare in the modern style yet irradiated from within by exquisitely drawn lines and a rare capacity for dynamic refinement.

The DVD is probably worth acquiring for the slow movement alone. Here Faust’s playing, married to the Berlin Philharmonic’s characteristic patience and fabled refinement of sound, captures even more completely what Tovey called the movement’s ‘sublime inaction’. And perhaps because this a live concert, the transfigured mood carries over into the finale, where Faust’s tone retains a warmth and intimacy that in no way inhibits the music’s gamesome mood.

As in her two previous recordings (there was an earlier Harmonia Mundi version with Jiří Bělohlávek), Faust’s cadenzas are based on Wolfgang Schneiderhan’s transcriptions of the cadenzas Beethoven wrote for his own transcription of the concerto for piano and orchestra. The first-movement cadenza famously contains a part for solo drum, a partner to the trivial little march tune which Beethoven introduces at this point. The drum might be fine for the already percussive piano cadenza, but for a solo violin? Still, it’s different. On the Abbado recording the drum is kept very much at a distance; and it’s not much clearer here, given the rather mellow Baden-Baden acoustic. On DVD, however, one can see the timpanist, which clarifies the sound!

In the Pastoral Symphony, it’s the eye which is the loser. Thanks to none-too-clever video direction, the eye quickly calls time on a performance which the ear is minded to linger over. My suggestion is that you drape your screen in crêpe de Chine (the colour can be suitably pastoral), after which you should be able to savour without distraction a pleasingly equable reading, lovingly played.