A correction to my comments on Thomas Zehetmair playing the Elgar violin concerto: the recording is really quite good, after all. You just need to turn the volume up a few notches then "dim and distant" vanish. I just hope my neighbours are Elgar-lovers.

And the performance really is exceptionally good. Knocks the socks off most of the competition (except, perhaps, the 1938 Sammons). But the recording certainly beats Sammons! This is probably the Elgar performance I shall now take down off the shelf any time I want to wallow in the violin concerto. Zehetmair has not, in the past, been a violinist who showed up on my radar; mainly, I suspect, because he rarely has played the kind of music that appeals to me.