Nicola Benedetti is on the verge of entering the Isserlis/Hough/Lewis/Osborne pantheon of distinction: does she ever produce a dud note, let alone performance? Here, she plays two diametrically opposed violin concertos, by Shostakovich and his teacher Glazunov (a fact I was completely unaware of). There surely can’t have been a master and pupil in all music who wrote in such different idioms, even allowing for the different universes they both lived in, but the unlikely juxtaposition works!

Shostakovich withheld his First Violin Concerto, composed in the 1940s, until after Stalin’s death in 1953, when the worst of the ‘terror’ appeared to have abated. Benedetti has described the Shostakovich Violin Concerto No 1 as “harrowing” to play and she graphically conveys this in the opening movement where she prowls this uniquely bleak, the night-is-always-darkest-just-before-the-dawn landscape (except that there is no dawn) like a traumatised soul, producing an appropriately wan tone.

The playing throughout is packed with a sense of powerful torment. In the manic Scherzo she demonstrates all the diablerie of Oistrakh and Vengerov in their legendary recordings, but it’s in the great third movement passacaglia where her playing reaches the white heat of emotion and...