It’s a violin contest we have to thank for this new duo partnership between longstanding DG artist Rafał Blechacz and the Korean violinist newcomer Bomsori Kim: the Polish pianist first approached Kim about partnering up having spotted her on television competing in the 2016 Henryk Wieniawski Violin Competition. Kim went on to take second prize but one suspects that, in the context of Blechacz and DG, she’s ultimately scored the jackpot.

It seems that Blechacz has done well to find Kim, too, because there’s an audible meeting of musical minds across their exploration of French lyricism and Polish melancholy, heard right from the start of the opening Fauré Violin Sonata No 1. First, Blechacz’s picked-out melody sings out brightly with passionate amour from within lucid-textured cascading figures. Then in comes Kim, counterfoiling her equal romance with a clean, supple sound. Engineering-wise, as well, there’s a nicely egalitarian balance between the two of them.

As it happens, the balancing isn’t always so evenly weighted. I’d like the piano to have remained further forwards in the Fauré’s second movement, for instance, and indeed throughout the Debussy Sonata. What does remain constant, however, is the sheer energy and drive, aided by Kim’s sound itself: direct and ardent, with mahogany-hued lower registers contrasting with sweetly ringing, singing upper ones. This all combines to especial effect with the Debussy, in an unusually driven, emotionally strong reading of this autumnal work. One of Kim’s most effective gifts here is her spotlighting of Debussy’s linguistic debt to the Orient; listen in the first movement to how grace-note inflections and sur la touche playing is so very husky and languorous that the parallels with Asian voice flute are unmissable (2'37" 2'50"). More intelligent detail comes by way of Blechacz’s voicing, such as towards the end of the second movement when he draws our attention to the isolated G and A quavers hidden within, but clashing against, the piano’s steadily pulsing semiquaver chords (3'32"). Perhaps their most striking joint effort comes towards the end of the third movement, where they take Debussy’s meno mosso and cedez markings right to the nth degree. Some may find this a bit too much of a pulling-on of the brakes, but no one can deny that it’s all in the score.

The Szymanowski Sonata then comes perfectly sculpted and paced from Blechacz, with Kim herself sounding every bit as much under its skin; listen to the colours and emotional shifts they bring to its Andantino tranquillo. Funnily, though, while Nathan Milstein’s transcription of Chopin’s Nocturne No 20 is theoretically the perfect palette cleanser, Kim’s romantic and highly vibrato’d reading leaves me slightly over-sated. Something more spartan and reined in would have been just the ticket here, and possibly have hit the piece’s particular brand of melancholy more squarely on the head.