The Berg and Beethoven violin concertos are not very often paired on disc, and apparently it was Claudio Abbado's idea that Isabelle Faust should record them together, with the orchestra of young professionals whose progress he has shaped and guided. The Berg is placed first on the disc, so that the Beethoven concerto can come as a joyous release of tension after its highly wrought tragedy, and the result is a pair of quite exceptional performances.

Abbado sets the tone for the Beethoven in his lissom account of the opening tutti, allowing Faust to make her entry in a way that always combines maximum expressive flexibility and a prodigious range of inflection with a concern for detail and a constant awareness of what the orchestra is doing, especially the woodwind solos that regularly thread through the textures beneath the soaring violin lines. Instead of the usually played cadenzas, Faust inserts her own, the first of which uses ideas (including the return of the opening timpani solo) from the one that Beethoven wrote when he made an arrangement of the work for piano and orchestra.

If that concerto is a wonderful collaborative effort then the performance of the Berg is even more remarkable. The vast palette of colour that Faust always seems to have at her disposal makes this perhaps the most sheerly beautiful performance of the work on disc. The way in which Abbado shapes the music and unflinchingly guides the movement towards the tragic climax in the third movement and its catharsis in the Bach chorale of the finale, uncovering so much detail along the way, is simply extraordinary, and profoundly moving.