When someone commented to Leopold Auer that he thought Heifetz played a piece too quickly, Auer is reputed to have replied: “Maybe, but you listened to every note, did you not?” And it is true: Heifetz had such a chameleon sound, with infinite variety of bowing, fingering, colouring, rubato and dynamics that we sit glued to the sound of what he is playing.

I remembered Auer's remark when listening to the latest CD (Hyperion) of Alina Ibragimova with Cédric Tiberghien. Along with perhaps Julia Fischer, Ibragimova has a wonderful palette of sound and dynamics, and the Ibragimova-Tiberghien duo is rapidly gaining the stature of such past combinations as Grumiaux-Haskil or Busch-Serkin. I love listening to the playing of Guillaume Lekeu's sonata for violin and piano on this new disc, and although I appear to have 82 (!!) recordings of various aspirants playing Ravel's Tzigane, Ibragimova is well up in the top echelon (though not up to Kopatchinskaja).

Ibragimova is unusual in that she seems equally at home (and impressive) in Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Bartok, Brahms, Debussy, Hartmann, Ravel, Lekeu, Roslavets, Strauss and Szymanowski. The only music she does not appear to play is the virtuoso repertoire (Paganini, Ernst, Sarasate, et al). Probably understandable; she is a supremely musical violinist and her incredible technique is put at the service of what she is playing, rather than flaunted. But I would love to hear her in Vieuxtemps and Spohr, for example. Still, she is only 23 or 24 and probably could not add much to the 32 versions of the Ronde des Lutins that I currently have on my shelves.

Another impressive thing about Ibragimova is that she is always photographed as a normal young woman, rather than posed as some super-model showing maximum flesh. The current CD has just one black and white photo of the violinist, in a warm-looking Icelandic sweater. A refreshing change from some of her competitors amongst the fleshy violin-babes.

We do, however, live in an incredible age when it comes to violin playing. To mention only younger female violinists whose playing I know and like, there are: Alina Ibragimova, Julia Fischer, Lisa Batiashvili, Liza Ferschtman, Janine Jansen, Hilary Hahn, Leila Josefowicz, Sarah Chang, Simone Lamsma, Tianwa Yang, Arabella Steinbacher, Isabelle Faust, Patricia Kopatschinskaja … and no doubt a horde of others whose names escape me for the time being.