By a very happy chance, I bought the debut CD of Ayako Uehara, the first Japanese, and the first woman, to win the Tchaikovsky prize in Moscow (2002). Quite simply: she convinces. She has technique to spare (sometimes she sounds like Horowitz on steroids) but, more importantly, she has that all-important way of making whatever she plays sound just right. You cannot imagine things otherwise. The music she plays is not that enthralling (seven short Tchaikovsky pieces, plus the Op 37 piano sonata). But her playing is quite entrancing. One of those lucky, spontaneous purchases.
I also listened to the 1941 recording by Gioconda de Vito of the Brahms violin concerto (Berlin, with Paul van Kempen conducting). What an amazing viola-like sound she had! The performance is superb -- much better technically than her poor effort with Furtwängler in Turin -- but I find the finale a bit sedate.