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The good news keeps on coming from the bow of Italian-Scots youngster Nicola Benedetti, who takes on the king of all the warhorses, Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto in E minor, Op. 64, for her second album, and delivers a fresh, well-worked-out interpretation. Benedetti, with expert support from the Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields under James MacMillan, avoids any overwrought quality that might have been brought on by the pressures of making a high-profile recording in a shrinking major-label classical environment. Indeed, her entire conception of the Mendelssohn concerto is not only smaller in scale than might have been expected, it is smaller than the modern norm for the work. The difference is apparent right from the concerto's striking opening, where many violinists try to crank out auditorium-sized sound to match the swelling stormy passions in the orchestral strings. Benedetti, here and throughout, is slender in tone and strongly oriented toward distinctively shaping the work's individual melodies.
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