The experience of listening to Julia Fischer’s latest CD was tinged with sadness, cast as it was in the shadow of Yakov Kreizberg’s recent death. Still, thanks to the miracle of recording, the artistic potency of this symbiotic musical relationship transcends time…much as it will a hundred years hence when none of us will be here. Fischer likens Respighi’s Poema autunnale to film music, which is true enough (it’s also true of much else that Respighi composed), and this warmly expressed performance focuses its combination of drive and reverie. Chausson’s Poème thrives on the sort of fluent dialogue that Fischer and Kreizberg achieved as a matter of course and, although Fischer’s playing is charged with emotion, she’s placed in a sensible relation to the orchestra, balance-wise, which helps accentuate the subtlety and inward drama of Chausson’s dialogic writing. As to The Lark Ascending, my own taste favours a performance where the soloist is a first among equals (Hugh Bean and Boult – EMI – have long provided my benchmark), and although Fischer’s playing is often sublimely beautiful – the higher reaches of her tone, especially – I find her performance marginally, and only marginally, too “soloistic”. But to call this performance anything less than sensitive would be unfair.

Suk’s dashing, concerto-style Fantasy was recently recorded by Michael Ludwig with the Buffalo Philharmonic under JoAnn Falletta (Naxos). Fischer and Kreizberg are more comprehensively compelling – Kreizberg’s witty handling of the variations section really made me smile – but I was happy to see that Supraphon have reissued Josef Suk’s 1984 recording, originally coupled with his second (1978) version of Dvorák’s Violin Concerto which, if anything, is even more gripping than his first, but that now includes, in addition to the Concerto, the lovely Dvorák Romance in F minor and the rapturously beautiful first movement of Suk’s Fairy Tale, all featuring the Czech Philharmonic under the perceptive direction of Václav Neumann.

Summing up, in comparing the two versions of the Fantasy, I would say that Fischer’s tonally alluring, full-blooded performance sits perfectly within the context of an imaginatively chosen programme, while the passionate projection and razor-like “edge” of Suk’s playing bring out all the temperament and local colour that his grandfather (the composer Josef Suk) and great-grandfather (Dvorák) were famous for.