The three sonatas for violin and piano of Brahms are each in three movements, but they have more in commom with the composer's knotty late chamber music than with the amateur-oriented world of the majority of violin sonatas in the 19th century. Each elaborates a basic mood or structure, the first intensely songful, the second compact and full of symbolic allusion, and the third capricious and often ethereal. They need room and a certain broad, relaxed quality to bring out all the detail without losing the essential lyrical nature of the genre and all the songs that are quoted or evoked across the set. The requisite breadth is there in this release by the highly photogrenic Armenian-born duo of Sergey and Lusine Khachatryan.

It's probably unfair to compare Sergey Khachatryan's 2006 recording of Shostakovich's violin concertos accompanied by Kurt Masur leading the Orchestre National de France with David Oistrakh's classic recordings of the works: the 1956 Mitropoulos/New York Philharmonic First and the 1967 Kondrashin/ Moscow Philharmonic Second. Not only was Oistrakh the dedicatee for both works, he was far and away the greatest of Soviet violinists, and his virile, soulful, impassioned, and supremely virtuosic interpretations have an authenticity and immediacy that no subsequent violinist has yet touched.