Ning Feng emerges from the dreamlike haze of strings at the beginning of Prokofiev’s First Violin Concerto with a hint of urgency. There is a fluency and imperative about his presentation of the ravishing first subject that gives more than a sense of where he is going with the piece. But why, I kept asking myself, was I not seduced by that opening or indeed the closing paragraph of this first movement (or for that matter the epilogue of the whole piece) – and then it struck me: I felt boxed in by the sound; there was little or no sense of acoustic, of space in which the music might breathe and resonate.

Immediacy is never a problem for me – I welcome it in recordings. But the ‘compression’ of this one gave me no sense of how the Bochum Symphony Orchestra under their conductor Tung-Chieh Chuang actually sounded. Clearly plenty of virtuosity on display, not least from Feng in the feisty main body of the first movement or the trenchant (belligerent) Scherzo – but there needs to be some air around what we are hearing for Prokofiev’s fairy dust to work its magic.

The Shostakovich First Concerto is a much more ‘serious’ piece and there can be no doubting Feng’s commitment to it or indeed involvement in it but the deeper subtext, that indescribable inwardness and searching quality, just wasn’t there for me and I’m convinced that lack of atmosphere was a major part of the problem. The level of intensity in the extraordinary slow-movement Passacaglia was never quite achieved here, with the harrowing cadenza it spawns not even close to suggesting a growing insanity and abandonment into the mad Russian dance of the finale.

In short, there are better – and far better-sounding – performances to choose from, not least Maxim Vengerov with Rostropovich and the LSO.