Lena Neudauer attracted international attention when at the age of fifteen she not only spectacularly won the Leopold Mozart Competition in Augsburg but also was awarded practically all the special prizes. And Matthias Kirschnereit, the ‘expressive musician par excellence’ (FAZ), has long enjoyed international renown. CPO have now brought together these two highly talented musicians for a recording of Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy’s Concerto for Violin, Piano, and String Orchestra, a work with a tradition extending from Bach and Baroque music by way of Mozart and Haydn to early romanticism. In the second early work heard on this CD, the Violin Concerto in D minor, the legacy of classicism and that of Bach’s highly regarded son Carl Philipp Emanuel, are clearly audible. For Mendelssohn’s teacher Zelter and contemporary audiences the musical aesthetic of the late eighteenth century continued to dictate taste.