Those with eyes and ears fixed on the BBC Young Musician competition will know that in 2020 the strings final was won by the teenage violinist Coco Tomita. Happily for us, Orchid Classics’ founder and director Matthew Trusler (himself one of our leading violinists) was on hand to record Coco’s debut album, and this is it. Coco herself devised the programme, making pertinent links here and there, the repertoire itself largely French, though the opening selection, unaccompanied violin music from George Enescu’s gypsy-style Impressions d’enfance, has Coco flick her exotic phrases in the way that Sherban Lupu and Gidon Kremer had done before her.

Francis Poulenc’s largely dramatic Violin Sonata comes next, a no-holds-barred performance by Tomita and her excellent pianist duo-partner Simon Callaghan, the music composed in 1942 43 in memory of the great Spanish poet Lorca. Judged harshly by the critics when it first appeared, nowadays we’re perhaps in a better position to appreciate its barbed language – and I don’t mean retrospectively. Lili Boulanger, Nadia’s sister, died at just 25. She was a composer for the last 10 years of her tragically short life and her music often echoes the perfumed world of Fauré. Tomita’s reading of Boulanger’s ‘Nocturne’ – which the young Jascha Heifetz pioneered with the utmost sensuality on an acoustic RCA recording – is maybe just a touch lacking in character when judged by Heifetz’s exalted standards. But whose isn’t? On the other hand, Tomita’s playing of Debussy’s ‘Beau soir’ in Heifetz’s tender arrangement is very lovely.

Then there’s Hubay’s spectacular take on themes from Bizet’s Carmen, his Fantaisie brillante of 1877, which predates Carmen-themed pieces by Sarasate, Busoni, Horowitz and Waxman. It’s a complex essay calling on all manner of technical tricks, which Tomita dispatches with great aplomb (try the lavishly embellished ‘Votre toast’), whereas the centrepiece of Ravel’s Second Sonata (‘Blues: Moderato’) sounds perhaps a little studied, shy almost, although the strumming pizzicatos later on are very well handled. But that’s to nitpick. I can well imagine that before long Coco Tomita will be celebrated among the best younger violinists and this superbly produced and engineered recording (thank you Andrew Keener and Oscar Torres) should prove an excellent calling card.