The main interest here lies with the miniature Enescu pieces, however slender they may be…[The Ballade] opens with haunting eloquence, nicely caught by the soloist Charlie Siem and the Philharmonia under Oleg Caetani. They sustain its melancholy flow and bring a similar heartfelt intensity to the first movement of Enescu's Aria and Scherzino.

Charlie Siem and Oleg Caetani have reached a harmonious accord in moulding the Brahms not as a symphonie manqué but a dialogue with its roots in the composer's chamber music and in outstanding concerto precedents, Beethoven's above all.

He’s certainly singing in this album dominated by Brahms’s mighty Violin Concerto, captured in an impassioned account full of that forward thrust that always helps Brahms along...Alongside the intensity of Siem and the Philharmonia there’s another reason that makes this recording distinctive: the use of the first movement cadenza devised in 1903 by the Romanian composer and violinist George Enescu, and a comparative rarity.