The annual Nobel Prize Concert in Stockholm is held as a tribute to the year’s Nobel Laureates. This live recording of the December 2009 concert opens with the Swedish national anthem, one of those off-the-peg tunes which no one can remember and most Swedes can’t sing (if this audience

is anything to go by). Temirkanov then gets things going with a breezy account of Shostakovich’s cheerily derivative Festive Overture. After the interval he conducts a selection from

Prokofiev’s two Romeo and Juliet suites, bizarrely ordered to commence with “Montagues and Capulets”, proceeding to “Romeo at Juliet’s Grave” and ending with the “Death of Tybalt”. The Stockholm players respond magnificently, as they do throughout.

Before this comes the concert’s highlight. Pianophiles will swoop on this opportunity to see and hear Martha Argerich in one of her specialities – Ravel’s G major Concerto. She is on top form, propelling the music forwards in the outer movements with scintillating rhythmic élan, precision and wit, finding a new expressive depth in her second movement solo, and matched by spirited and sensitive woodwind and brass soloists. Michael Beyer’s direction manages to illuminate Ravel’s kaleidoscopic orchestration without distracting from the performance itself. EuroArts’ timing of 6'56" for the last movement, incidentally, is incorrect: it is 3'47". The extra three minutes are audience applause, which Argerich acknowledges with a charming little Chopin Mazurka.

The Ravel is common to both discs, as are the booklet-notes on the work. Hélène Grimaud’s take on it is more matter-of-fact and almost mechanical. While she is Argerich’s equal in dexterity, her more glacial tone, most noticeable in the slow-movement solo, ultimately fails to engage in the same way. Nor is director Louise Narboni’s photography as crisply focused or choice of shots as adept as Beyer’s – a long view just at the point when a close-up of Grimaud is needed, for example, a pointless cut away to Jurowski during Grimaud’s solo and, most infuriatingly, during the first down-beat of Le bourgeois gentilhomme. Jurowski conjures up some fine playing in this, encouraging his section leaders to play up the humour of the score (“Das Diner”, for instance), but the best of the disc is the opening work, an impassioned, heartfelt account of Strauss’s Metamorphosen, his “study for 23 solo strings” composed in 1946. Phrases are lovingly sculpted, individual lines translucent, with Jurowski firmly in control of the work’s arc. The ending is magically handled and truly affecting.