The coupling is one of contrasts, much as an album of Richard Strauss and Stravinsky would present. While it’s perfectly possible to imagine a musician equally sympathetic to both idioms – as Usha Kapoor is, in fact – it’s hard to envisage a listener in the mood for one followed by the other (without, that is, engaging in a conscious act of mental agility).

Beach wrote the Violin Sonata in 1896. She was not yet 30 and her voice would become more fully her own later on, especially in her piano output. What stands out in the sonata is her assured handling of the two instruments, which always play to their strengths even when mostly engaged in conversation rather than contest. It helps that the Resonus founder/engineer Adam Binks has given each musician their own space in the mix – there is no clashing resonance or covering of one another – with Kapoor a foot or two nearer the microphone than Edward Leung.

Kapoor’s centred tone and light hand on its sometimes heavy Romanticism stand out from her modern rivals in the piece on record. Perhaps Joseph Silverstein (on New World Records) rushes his fences in the outer movements by comparison, but his partnership with Gilbert Kalish catches fire, and their feeling for the sonata transcends good taste and musicianship.

Back in 1967, the Musical Times critic summed up Corigliano’s Violin Sonata of 1964 as a ‘good, middle-of-the-road piece in an idiom that would not have startled 50 years ago’. Almost 60 years later, the modernity of the piece has proved more durable than that, and for that matter more than most of Corigliano’s later output. The form echoes that of Stravinsky’s Violin Concerto – abrasive introduction to a pair of contrasting slow movements and leaping finale – but the proportions are so distinctively skewed that the ear is drawn more to difference than similarity. Kapoor and Leung sail through the hair-raising polyrhythms of the outer movements – 19/8 against 5/8, all in a day’s work – and the mouse-behind-the-skirting-board figuration for the finale’s second subject (or sparrows, if you prefer) is brought off by Kapoor with great mischief. I was in more of a Corigliano mood this time, but tomorrow could well be different, and the album would be equally rewarding.