Dvorák’s Violin Concerto is a neglected masterpiece, overshadowed by its cello counterpart and the New World Symphony, but it’s never likely to have a better advocate than German violinist Julia Fischer. Don’t be fooled into thinking that the glamorous 30-year-old former prize-winner in the Menuhin Competition is yet another of these ubiquitous entertainers firing up the classics while prancing about decoratively in Armani. She’s a violinist of the old school,
 with a sweet, penetrating tone
(old-timers should think David
Oistrakh or Nathan Milstein)
 focussed always on the phrase at 
hand and never the personality driving it.
 And she’s found her conducting counterpart in David Zinman and his Zurich Tonhalle Orchestra, a man whose recording history, taking in THE recording of the Górecki
Third Symphony and an acclaimed complete Beethoven cycle plus much more, turns many of the oh-darling-isn’t-he-wonderful celebrity conductors into also-rans.

The balance of this recording, the sympatico between soloist and orchestra, and the intelligence of the approach is a joy, the
first movement filled with Dvorák’s Czech equivalent of Sturm und Drang (the result, perhaps, of his friendships with Brahms and Joachim who both had some kind of hand in the concerto’s genesis), while the slow movement is as lovely as you...