For the opening concerts of the 2008 Schleswig-Holstein Festival, the NDR Sinfonieorchester and Christoph von Dohnányi were joined by the 26-year-old German-Japanese violinist Arabella Steinbacher. She and Dohnányi ‘took the non troppo indications very seriously’ in the outer movements of Brahms’s Violin Concerto, according to the Hamburger Abendblatt. In this ‘unusually slow, always exciting’ performance, she drew ‘a wonderfully slender tone’ from her ‘del Gesù’ violin, and followed the concerto with unaccompanied Bach: the Largo from the C major Sonata, done with ‘pure sound, no pressure and a grand sense of line’.