Bartók wrote his Concerto for Orchestra during a sweltering New York summer at the end of his life, weak with leukaemia and heartsick for Hungary. It was his last completed score but conductor Emmanuel Krivine gives it a youthful glow here, almost a naive sincerity. There’s poise and refinement to the wind playing, which is less sardonic than in many accounts — those bitingly bitonal trumpets in the second movement sound cheerful long before the sunny chorale arrives.
The nocturnal Elegia is a glittering dream, never sinister, and even the send-up of Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony is wholesomely cheeky. The Luxembourg Philharmonic is alert and agile but lacks the depths of the best recordings (try Ivan Fischer and the Budapest Festival Orchestra. Albanian violinist Tedi Papavrami is immensely lyrical in the Second Violin Concerto, a rich mezzo voice above Krivine’s lithe backdrop with the same urgent, blazing virtuosity that made his Ysaÿe sonatas album so exciting last year.
