Last week Augustin Hadelich gave an unforgettable reading of Mendelssohn. This week Sydney audiences got to see a more intimate side of the violinist justly described by SSO Chief Conductor Simone Young as “beyond virtuosic”.

Billed as Dazzling Centuries of Virtuosity, the program drew on works from the 18th and 20th centuries, neatly dovetailed with two excerpts from US composer David Lang’s Mystery Sonatas, written for the American-German star and inspired by Franz Ignatius Biber’s Rosary Sonatas from the 17th century.

Concertmaster Andrew Haveron led a group of 26 SSO players for the two-hour concert in the five-star acoustic of the City Recital Hall, but it was the sweet tone of Hadelich’s 1744 Guarneri Leduc, ex-Szeryng alone that started the evening with a mesmeric seven-minute solo Before Sorrow, Lang’s salute to Biber’s Sonata No. 3, its sinuous, contemplative weaving starting strong then fading to a whisper before reviving and subsiding again in a higher register.

This formed an effective segue into the ominous and sometimes stark landscape of Dmitri Shostakovich’s Violin Sonata Op. 134, arranged for orchestra and percussion, with the strings taking the uneasy piano part while the violin wanders on some sort of bleak quest.

After the chilly wastes of the Prelude,...