Kashkashian's superbly engineered recording of the Bartók Viola Concerto bears witness to a total identification between performer and composer.
Even the tiny pause bridging the opening and the secondary idea growing out of it, is perfectly judged. Kashkashian makes this music dance, not just in the finale but also in the way that she phrases and articulates the entire piece. Eötvös's conducting offers many parallel insights, not least towards the end of the first movement where a growing sense of agitation throws the succeeding Adagio religioso into a particularly favourable light.
Eötvös employs Tibor Serly's completion, revising odd details and accommodating a few articulations and phrasings that Kashkashian has herself instigated. If you need convincing that Bartók's Viola Concerto is a great work, then Kashkashian and Eötvos should, between them, do the trick.
Of the other pieces, Eötvös's Replica for viola and orchestra is astonishing music in which foggy harmonies hover between startled highs and raucous lows, then mutate into a strange, sickly pulsing. By contrast, György Kurtág's early Movement for Viola and Orchestra – twothirds of a concerto Kurtág completed in 1953-4 – is relatively conventional, with plenty of virtuoso viola writing.