Lisa Batiashvili (violin), Bavarian Radio SO/Esa-Pekka Salonen, Hélène Grimaud (piano) Deutsche Grammophon 477 9299*****

Georgian violinist Lisa Batiashvili’s DG debut constitutes a kind of Soviet and post-Soviet mood-painting. Batiashvili collaborates with French pianist Hélène Grimaud in Arvo Pärt’s atmospheric Spiegel im Spiegel and the Vocalise by Rachmaninov (who was effectively exiled by the 1917 revolution), and there’s light relief in a Shostakovich waltz, orchestrated by Batiashvili’s father.

The Soviet Union had disappeared when fellow expatriate Georgian Giya Kancheli framed the slow, lonely trails of his 1994 V V with haunting funereal singing. But the real meat on this disc is Shostakovich’s First Violin Concerto, written for David Oistrakh in the late 1940s but kept in a drawer until after Stalin’s death. Batiashvili traces her violinist lineage back to Oistrakh and, persuasively and individually, makes the work as fully hers as he did. See url.ie/57as