Vadim Gluzman has recently been impressing audiences in Perth and Melbourne with his Tchaikovsky Concerto, but it was Prokofiev he brought to this performance with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, under the baton of Chinese-American conductor Xian Zhang.

Vadim Gluzman. Photo © Marco Borggreve

Gluzman lauded the “unusually dark low register” of his Stradivarius (which once belonged to Leopold Auer) in a recent interview with Limelight, and he wasn’t exaggerating – the sound he drew from the instrument in the solo opening figure of Prokofiev’s Second Violin Concerto was captivating.

Premiered in 1935, the year before Prokofiev made his rather ill-fated return to the Soviet Union, some see this concerto’s accessible lyricism as a deliberate attempt to prepare for his triumphant return to Russia. Whether cynical or not, the piece is, as Limelight’s Philip Scott put it when Lisa Batiashvili performed the Concerto in Sydney last year, “well on the way to becoming the more popular of his two violin concertos” – and the fact that it’s had an airing at the SSO two years running goes some way to prove...