The inside cover of this disc shows Grażyna Bacewicz holding a violin; and if you discovered this composer through the Silesian Quartet’s recent Gramophone Award-winning cycle of her string quartets (Chandos, 8/16), you won’t need to be told why. Bacewicz was a virtuoso violinist, and the instinct for string sonorities that makes her quartets so gloriously listenable also permeates her violin sonatas. The individual works here have, for the most part, been recorded before, but so far as I can tell Annabelle Berthomé-Reynolds and Ivan Donchev are the first to perform all seven violin sonatas, accompanied and unaccompanied, in one recording, along with the imposing Partita of 1955.

And as with her quartets, Bacewicz offers a feast of musicality, wit and concentrated emotion. It’s fascinating to map these works on to her biography. The assured and expressive First Sonata for unaccompanied violin of 1941 and the playful, neo-Baroque Sonata da camera (for violin and piano) of 1945 are both, in their way, acts of life-affirming defiance during the Nazi occupation of Poland: conscious homages to what the composer termed Bach’s ‘victory over time’ (the booklet notes are thorough and very readable).

With the Third Sonata of 1947 there’s a new sense of a fully formed creative voice expressing itself with absolute command. The journey through to the Partita (another, much graver homage to Bach) and the intensely personal but still piercingly lucid Second Solo Sonata (1958 – she asked for the Adagio to be played at her funeral) shows Bacewicz walking a very individual line between the conflicting dogmas of socialist realism and post-war modernism, and doing so with sincerity and a wry underlying wit.

I wish I could be as enthusiastic about these performances. In fairness, Berthomé-Reynolds and Donchev do convey enough of the essential character of this music to give some enjoyment. They’re red-blooded, and they keep things taut and mobile. Donchev in particular is adept at creating a sense of space and atmosphere in his phrasing, though the piano sound is a little recessed and slightly harsher than I’d like.

Berthomé-Reynolds is at her best in the two unaccompanied works; and while she does generally capture Bacewicz’s quicksilver shifts between sul ponticello and pizzicato, and lyricism and bravura, too much of her tuning is hit-and-miss. Her wide-grained tone is not unattractive, though it’s a very blunt instrument compared to the gleaming, fluid virtuosity of Lydia Mordkovitch’s Bacewicz sonatas (Chandos, 9/08). But no other currently available set offers quite so much of this wonderful music in one place, and for that reason – and until something better comes along – it’s recommendable.