I can remember first hearing the Kodály Solo Sonata, nearly 50 years ago, and being amazed at its scope and at the composer’s extraordinary resourcefulness. Something of this sense of wonderment returned on listening to Natalie Clein’s account; she produces an astonishing range of colours and evokes the widest variety of expressive styles. I find it admirable, too, how she’s able, in the recording studio, to maintain so much of the excitement and directness of live performance. Music of this rhetorical character demands a fine sense of timing; Clein demonstrates this, and her air of conviction is sustained through the first movement’s intense declamation, the Adagio’s rich, low-range melodies, the finale’s dance rhythms and the eerily quiet “natural” sounds that punctuate the discourse. It must be said that Clein is more concerned with expression than beauty of tone in her effort to capture something of the roughness and raw edges of folk music.

The rest of the programme has a more refined character and Julius Drake’s expressive playing is a fine match for Clein’s outgoing manner. There’s a noble performance of the well known Adagio and a sensitive account, stressing its impressionistic features, of the 1922 Sonatina. The Epigrams of 1954, intended originally as vocalises, are delightful short pieces with only subtle hints of Kodály’s nationalistic style. These, too, are beautifully and simply played, with Clein keeping to the original vocal range, I imagine. A recording of great immediacy points up the variety of the programme, from the Sonata’s grandeur and vividness to the intimacy of the Epigrams