Not for a second am I claiming that Colorado-based banjo wizard Jake Schepps’s reimaginings of Béla Bartók have anything to do with Tammy Wynette or Kenny Rogers but there is a certain ‘yeehaw’ flavour to this music that, while inoffensive, doesn’t do Bartók many favours. Sensibly, Schepps has stayed well clear of the Bartók of the string quartets or Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta; instead he has reworked chunks of Mikrokosmos, Hungarian Dances and the 44 Duos, implanting the inflections of bluegrass inside Bartók’s patterns, rumprolling the rhythms and generally cranking everything out at a bright ‘can do’ tempo.

‘Stars, Stars Brightly Shine’ from For Children is an exception. It slows the pace, breathing with the grain of Bartók’s plaintive melody, Ryan Drickey’s violin grazing against blades of bluegrass plucking from banjo, mandolin and guitar. Elsewhere the relentlessly upbeat grooves and polished harmonies become too much of a cheerful earful, telling us more about idiomatic banjo- and guitar-playing than revealing any ‘must hear’ peculiarities about Bartók’s harvesting of folk material.