James Ehnes, the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra and its charismatic music director Kirill Karabits went directly to the studio to record these two great 20th-century concertos after performing them in concerts the Observer described as ‘extraordinary’. Of the Shostakovich, the paper went on to say ‘the brilliant James Ehnes … apparently encountering no technical problems in this hazardously difficult work, transmitted its mood of bitter melancholy and dry-eyed grief with alert, responsive support from the orchestra’.