The four violin sonatas that Charles Ives assembled between 1902 and 1915 have never been big hitters in the same league as his Concord Sonata or the perpetually undervalued First Piano Sonata. Ives wrote a selection of individual movements for violin and piano which were then grouped into four three-movement structures. If you’re not careful, the four sonatas, when played back to back, can sound like a rambling digression threaded together with interchangeable material. And Annabelle Berthomé-Reynolds and Dirk Herten needed to be more careful.

Their cause is not helped by a tinny, lifeless sound environment that too often allows the violin to be swamped by the piano (the suspicion that things were done on a shoestring is heightened by the lack of booklet-notes). There are at least three outstanding existing sets in the catalogue, ranging from Hilary Hahn and Valentina Lisitsa’s set – consistently charming, if occasionally tipping towards raw sentiment – to the steely control of Gregory Fulkerson and Robert Shannon. Curt Thompson and Rodney Waters pitch their tent somewhere in the interpretative middle; and in this elevated company Berthomé-Reynolds and Herten can be no one’s idea of good enough.

The opening Adagio of the Third Sonata encapsulates many of the prevailing problems. Berthomé-Reynolds’s tone is oddly monotonous while rhythms are stilted, without even a hint of Ivesian concertinaed flexibility. Where the likes of Hahn and Fulkerson sing through the opening line, Berthomé-Reynolds mumbles a sequence of disjointed phrases – a sudden leap in register equating to an abrupt gear change. To add to the charge sheet is an overly homogenised palette, which might indeed fool you into thinking that Ives’s material is interchangeable. But it doesn’t have to be like this – Curt Thompson’s lightness of touch during the Fourth Sonata, with supple changes of colour as the material shifts focus, speaks more of a painterly sense of inner motion and narrative perspective.