It’s a shame that Saint-Saëns couldn’t have been as nice about Franck’s Violin Sonata as he was about Fauré’s (‘with this work, Monsieur Fauré takes his place among the masters’), as they sit in companionable accomplishment on this disc. Both present radical musical ideas without outwardly breaking with tradition, and provide a comforting journey through the misty lyricism of their musical predecessors. No wonder, then, that they’re both so prolifically recorded. But although this recording is noticeably more spacious than some may consider comfortable (the piano in particular is set so far away in Champs Hill’s spacious acoustic that it sounds as if it is calling to the violin from another room), these are careful and insightful performances of pieces whose identities are predicated upon profoundly different principles.

Fauré’s constant unfolding of melody and Franck’s examination of a single, tiny motif and the infinity of its possibilities are presented equally skilfully as being as intimate as they are radiant (Franck) or buoyant (Fauré). They are sandwiched around Poulenc’s Violin Sonata, reluctantly written over a long period in the 1940s but which, although an enormous contrast to its disc-mates, still has melody and shares the same sense of equality between the instruments. In fact, all three sonatas are conjoined by this need to combine exuberance with calm to avoid losing their different subtleties, and this Guzzo and Lovett do with great poise and elegant understatement.