Programmes challenging conventional expectations have been a feature of Hilary Hahn’s recording career from the word go. Her debut concerto disc dared to couple the Beethoven with Leonard Bernstein’s Serenade (Sony, 3/99), then something of a rarity. Her latest project, straddling a sabbatical year that has turned out to be less than ideally timed, concludes with first recordings of two compositions bearing that same indeterminate label.

Nearing the end of his life, Einojuhani Rautavaara looked back nostalgically and without irony in music tailor-made for these performers. The recording derives from the posthumous premiere they gave in Paris in February 2019. Was Rautavaara remembering the Op 69 Serenades Sibelius completed before the First World War, a violin-led pair of comparably modest dimensions? Rautavaara’s ‘Sérénade pour mon amour’ has a lyricism and nobility of utterance that should appeal beyond the ranks of diehard devotees to admirers of the more melodic VW, the earlier Tippett and the lighter Sibelius. Its soothing eight minutes, essentially one long tune for violin and strings, could find a mass audience on Classic FM. The ‘Sérénade pour la vie’, not quite finished at the time of Rautavaara’s death, has been fleshed out for larger forces by Kalevi Aho. It finds its way less easily to an abrupt agitato denouement. These accounts must be reckoned authoritative. The team had previously championed the composer’s more astringent Violin Concerto (1977) and their request for something new to be played in Paris was thought to have remained a pipe dream until the manuscript came to light.

It’s surprising then to find Prokofiev’s first masterpiece in the form at the heart of the present sequence. Indifferently received at its 1923 premiere in the city of light and love that gives the album its unifying thread, it was Joseph Szigeti who then established the concerto in the West, David Oistrakh performing the same function in the Soviet bloc. Their recordings (Naxos, 12/35; Warner, 9/55) remain accessible, alongside dozens more, yet I doubt whether the score has ever been played ‘better’ than it is here. While others find additional pockets of charm and tenderness, few demonstrate Hahn’s grip on the argument. Never have I heard the quick-fire second movement dispatched with such focused intensity. There are no unnatural gear changes, no tendency to race, rather a steely determination to differentiate between sul ponticello and con sordino reiterations of the same material, to articulate every single note, however fleeting. The performance is good enough to have one constantly reassessing firm favourites. Is Kyung-Wha Chung’s seductive blues-inflected freedom under André Previn (Decca, 3/77) actually a ruse to get round the notes? Is even Oistrakh’s tuning with Lovro von Matačić absolutely spot on, and why doesn’t he make more of those markings in the Scherzo?

Without going as far as some to embrace the modernist grit in Prokofiev’s oyster, Hahn reminds us that this is an opus Stravinsky admired, at once sweet, cool and precise. Sticking with mainstream tempos, Mikko Franck’s orchestral fabric conveys a newly minted quality from the moment he has the opening melody float over a fairy-tale shimmer subtler than that encoded on the page. Old-school string-based textures are largely discarded in favour of a more detailed, linear approach. The sound team foregrounds Hahn’s intonationally rock-solid violin without obscuring detail. The bassoon is suitably ‘present’ in the finale. You don’t hear that much tuba – then again does anyone really want to? The soloist’s crystalline trill-chains register clearly towards the close. Marvellous!

Chausson’s sensual Poème of 1896 is heard less frequently these days and sceptics might wonder why it was chosen as curtain-raiser. Like the Prokofiev it includes a part for tuba. Like the Rautavaara it can be seen as something of an end-of-life piece – if only because Chausson was killed in a cycling accident three years later. He was at least a Parisian and Hahn feels a further connection via the great Belgian virtuoso for whom it was intended: Eugène Ysaÿe was her teacher’s teacher. She plays the score with passionate intensity even if her wonderfully secure tone is less immediately seductive than, say, Itzhak Perlman’s in this kind of repertoire. His analogue classic (Warner, 1/76) has Jean Martinon’s timbrally distinctive Orchestre de Paris set back in a bigger Wagnerian acoustic. Mikko Franck, a man of our own time, has different priorities, like making sure the last chord stays in tune. For younger listeners this will be all to the good. DG’s pretty-pretty design concept may or may not appeal but Hahn’s own written commentary is perceptive, never pretentious. Fans will already have marked this one down as a compulsory purchase and likely Awards contender. They’re not wrong.