The idea for this recording came out of a casual conversation between fellow Georgians Lisa Batiashvili and Nikoloz Rachveli about the genius of film composers such as Chaplin and Morricone, and ended up as something of a travelogue, with each of its 12 tracks reflecting the violinist’s relationship with a different city. In many ways, it’s closer to a pop music concept album, like Sinatra’s ‘Come Fly with Me’ (1958), than a classical recital programme. Contributing to this impression, many of Rachveli’s arrangements have a lushness that brings to mind the work of, say, Billy May (who did the orchestrations for ‘Come Fly with Me’) or Nelson Riddle. The sound is slickly produced, with Batiashvili made an almost otherworldly presence, like the voice of the Wizard in The Wizard of Oz – reverberant and larger than life. There are a host of special effects, too. At the end of ‘Paris’, for instance, a technicoloured version of a sweetly nostalgic melody by Michel Legrand gradually fades to black-and-white, as the sound is manipulated to evoke a skipping, scratchy old record.

The album begins with a medley of tunes from Chaplin films, shaped by Rachveli into a suave narrative arc. Hollywood glamour returns with the love theme from Morricone’s Cinema Paradiso, Batiashvili’s homage to ‘Rome’, in the guise of an unabashedly sentimental duet between Batiashvili and the cellist Maximilian Hornung. ‘Berlin’, a dramatic fantasy on ‘Ich hab’ noch einen Koffer in Berlin’ (made famous by Marlene Dietrich), features the German jazz trumpeter Till Brönner, who improvises coolly around Batiashvili, who plays it straight, as it were. For ‘London’, the Georgian-born pop star Katie Melua sings a saccharine song she wrote for the album, which makes me feel a little less miffed that New York, my own city, is represented by Czech music – an excerpt from the slow movement of Dvořák’s New World Symphony.

At no point can I fault Batiashvili’s playing. She’s unfailingly expressive and sends off fireworks when called for, as in The Lark – the Enescu-esque ‘Bucharest’ selection – or Strauss’s Furioso Galopp (‘Vienna’). Yet while the orchestral playing is well drilled, I often find it seems more dutiful than exuberant. Rhythms in the Piazzolla set, for instance, have nowhere near enough bite. Not surprisingly, perhaps, the most intensely played number is the one representing Tbilisi, Batiashvili and Rachveli’s hometown. It’s also the most daring musically. A Medley on Themes by Giya Kancheli may not seem promising on paper but Rachveli does justice to the Georgian composer who died last year. Here, at last, given meaningful contrast, the thread of sentimentality that runs through the record shines pure and bright.