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Chief among the reasons to welcome Nicola Benedetti's début recording is for the profile that it will bring to Szymanowski's First Violin Concerto, a beautiful and strangely neglected work. (The performance that she gave of it at the BBC Young Musician of the Year final in the Usher Hall last year was only the second time that I'd heard it live). It was a shrewd choice of concerto for her. It doesn't have the ghosts of famous interpretations hanging around it, and its ripe romanticism will always have a wide audience appeal. Benedetti is admirably secure throughout the work's many high-lying passages, and she sounds more spontaneous than she did in the Young Musician final, where her playing was very beautiful but not especially communicative. Her choice of conductor, Daniel Harding, may well have been a factor in the extra freedom and warmth of her performance. He encourages the LSO into often febrile playing, with gloriously calorific climaxes – DG's reportage is pleasingly opulent. Benedetti's chosen fill-ups (by Saint-Saëns, Chausson, Massenet, Brahms and Tavener) don't in all honesty have much to do with the price of tea in China – Szymanowski's natural bedfellows are Scriabin and early Stravinsky – but they enable her to show off her chops in the Saint-Saëns Havanaise, and you'll never find me turning my nose up at Chausson's lovely Poème. DG's liner notes are very artist-centred, which is fair enough in an album designed to introduce a young artist to as wide a public as possible. They also invite you to 'Get your Official Nicola Benedetti Truetones & Ringtones Now!' – I think that I might just pass on those!
Reviewed by Sandy Matheson