For those interested in the music of William Mathias, a still much-underrated British composer, this recording is particularly welcome for the insight we gain into the development of the composer’s style. The ‘juvenile’ Violin Sonata of 1952 – to use Mathias’s own description – was not among those works later in life which he considered should see the light of day but recent audiences, impressed by its power and directness, convinced the composer’s estate to have it recorded. Though unequal in places, there are numerous pointers in the work’s facility which point to the later concision of Mathias’s mature voice, the slow movement in particular possessing some real fluency and coherence.

The Violin Sonata No 1 of 1962 shows that the richer, post-romantic harmony of his unpublished earlier sonata was jettisoned in favour of a more rhythmically vital language where the acerbic and lyrically luminous happily complement one another, especially in the last movement. There is also a much clearer and more integrated sense of organic growth about each movement and the larger tonal scheme of the three movements in general. Most compelling, for me at least, is the second movement, a harmonically bittersweet berceuse of carefully gauged intensity.

The larger, dynamic Violin Sonata No 2, written 22 years later, is a more concentrated work, more polarised in its rhetorical extremes (its dissonance has an almost Bartók-like intensity), yet there is, paradoxically, a greater degree of introspection in the quieter sections of the work which Trickey and Llewelyn-Jones bring out with precision and sympathy.