Some of Saint-Saëns’s finest works are for the violin. One violinist in particular was the inspiration and beneficiary of these: Pablo de Sarasate, for whom Saint-Saëns wrote his Introduction and Rondo capriccioso and the Violin Concertos Nos 1 and 3. Like the piano concertos of Beethoven and Chopin, Saint-Saëns’s Second Violin Concerto was written before the First but published after it.

All three do not come up that often on a single disc and in sequence. They have never, as far as I know, been recorded live as they are here – assembled from performances over three days in the Maison Symphonique de Montréal. If Andrew Wan’s accounts are not at the very top of the tree, they are certainly jolly close to it. For those who have not encountered Wan before, he was appointed Concertmaster of the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal in 2008 (two years after Kent Nagano took over as music director) but has a flourishing parallel career as a soloist and chamber musician. His sweet, even tone and unshowy brilliance put me in mind of his fellow Canadian James Ehnes, while the long-standing working relationship of soloist and conductor makes for a happy partnership in the ebb and flow of these graceful works (especially true of the less familiar and underrated First and Second Concertos).

Of recent versions, Wan’s strongest rivals are the talented Fanny Clamagirand with the Sinfonia Finlandia Jyväskylä under Patrick Gallois. The sound picture is better focused on the Analekta disc and the Finnish players do not have the finesse of the Canadians (compare the rapt final pages of the Third Concerto’s second movement), but Clamagirand’s spirited attack and complete empathy with Saint-Saëns’s idiom make her accounts, in my view, preferable even to Philippe Graffin’s highly praised versions (Hyperion, 10/99). My one reservation about Wan/Nagano is the finale of No 3, which never quite generates the same excitement or, in its soaring second subject, ecstatic intensity as Louis Kaufman in 1945 with the Santa Monica Symphony and Jacques Rachmilovich (Biddulph).