Greek classical music often means Skalkottas or Theodorakis, but as the four composers represented in this enjoyable programme of violin-and-piano pieces show, there was more to it than them. Curiously, only two were born in Greece: Dinos Constantinides (1929-2021), who spent half his life in Louisville, and Athenian Dimitri Terzakis (b1938), who worked mostly in Germany and Switzerland. The thread connecting them with Yannis (Ioannis) Constantinidis (1903 84; born in Smyrna in modern Turkey) and German-born, part-Greek, part-Croat Boris Papandopulo (1906 91) is dislocation from their Hellenic roots, and the expressive bridges linking their music back to their cultural homeland.

Yannis Constantinidis, aka Kostas Giannidis, left Smyrna to study in Athens just before the Turks expelled the Greeks from Anatolia in 1922, remaining displaced within Greece thereafter. He composed his delightful Suite on Popular Greek Songs of the Dodecanese (1948) not from original research but from a Swiss collection curated by Samuel Baud-Bovy. Close to the manner of Skalkottas’s Greek Dances, the suite is more manicured in presentation.

Dinos Constantinides (no relation) composed in a more advanced style. His 1971 Viola Sonata – reworked in 1977 for violin, performed here – is claimed as his ‘most strictly twelve-tone music’ but with its use of isorhythm and long, lyrical lines it proves vibrant and rather appealing, revelling in its updated Hellenism. Terzakis’s 10 miniatures Sprüche im Wind (‘Words in the Wind’, 2009) are Webern-like in their brevity but less single-minded collectively. Danae Papamattheou-Matschke views the set as a ‘poetic distillation’ of the Sonate infernale (2008 09, after Dante) that immediately preceded it. I agree, as I find nothing remotely infernal in the larger work, which it follows here.

The programme opens with delightful, appealingly melodic works reflecting the wider Balkan view of Boris Papandopulo. His Meditation (1987) and Violin Sonata (1988) are beautifully played by father and daughter duo Uwe Matschke and Danae Papamattheou-Matschke, who catch the music’s shared heritage superbly well. They are equally vivid and persuasive in the rest of the programme, clearly believing in Terzakis’s infernal sonata even if I am not! BIS’s sound is, as always, excellent.