Faust is the Wise Child of the violin world, combining the innocent exuberance of a prodigy with a commanding intellectual depth that carries all before it…If the Reformation is harder to love than its predecessors, Heras-Casado strips off its Sunday best: all is fiery warmth and immediacy, with brindled horns and bristling articulate strings.

The Symphony No 5, the “Reformation”, labours over its Lutheran connections, but a performance as ardent as this one by the Freiburger Barockorchester under Pablo Heras-Casado has something of an evangelist’s fiery rhetoric. Period instruments also score in the Violin Concerto. Isabelle Faust is a soloist of elfin quickness of spirit and there is tremendous drive overall

[Faust’s] playing throughout is remarkable not only for the expected attributes of fidelity and accuracy but for the tough, wild and impassioned qualities she restores to a piece which easily falls prone to white-dress, sugar-and-spice performances…The disc will rightly attract attention for Faust; but anyone collecting Heras-Casado’s cycle of Mendelssohn will snap this up and wait eagerly for the final instalment.

Faust’s research infuses the sound-world of the piece from the very first phrase...Her treatment of the plaintive E minor melody at the opening showcases two of the main stylistic innovations which result from her mining of the archives: very little vibrato, with the sound warmed instead by liberal but judiciously-applied portamento...There’s always the sense that the music’s being well-served rather than short-changed by these choices.

It’s rare to hear such a hoary old work sound so fresh. Her playing and that of the orchestra is long of line but short on vibrato, and the pursuit of an authentic Mendelssohnian style leads Faust to some choices that will have modern listeners doing an aural double take...And yet the whole thing hangs together – it’s raw-edged, urgent and not always beautiful, but always compelling.

[Faust] takes the radical decision to perform the work as scholars now think mid-19th-century violinists would have done: with minimal vibrato, but lots of slides between the notes and very different bowings, making the piece sound far spikier and febrile than the suavely efficient readings one usually hears today. Some may think her tone is too parched; I loved it.

Caracteristically lithe and muscular readings of the Hebrides Overture and Fifth Symphony, the latter especially invigorating in its bracing bite, poise and interpretative chutzpah…Certainly, it's all bracingly – not to say startlingly – different from what we are used to hearing, and the disc as a whole pleasingly challenges and confounds in equal measure.