Poulenc wasn’t instinctively drawn to the violin sonata: ‘The prima donna violin over arpeggiated piano nauseates me’, he’s reported to have said. Hard to guess, then, what he’d make of this curiously programmed recital, which places his solitary Violin Sonata between the Bulgarian Pancho Vladigerov – a Romantic with a capital R – and Peter Seabourne’s homage to Chopin, who pretty much patented that whole lyrical-sentimental idiom.

But it actually makes a strangely satisfying sequence, and one that shows the particular qualities of these performers to good advantage. Some adjustment will be needed at first: the acoustic is close and boxy, and the piano – apparently a Steinway Model B – initially sounds synthetic and hard-edged, a bit like a clavinova. Nor does the recording flatter the upper register of Borissova’s violin (though she plays with fine body and bite on the lower strings). Once the ear has adjusted it’s easier to appreciate the pair’s rapport and sense of drama; perfect for the sweeping vistas of Vladigerov’s 1914 Sonata, a work that could easily have emerged from Vienna or Berlin that same year.

But that brittle, upfront sound is actually an asset in the Poulenc, which the pair approach in restless, sometimes savage strokes of colour – Borissova’s plangent double-stopping in the second movement’s homage to Lorca is sultry without being sentimental. And it’s highly effective, too, in Seabourne’s A Portrait and Four Nocturnes: not, Seabourne insists, a sort of ‘Chopiniana’ but an expressionistic meditation on romanticism itself, etched in silvery harmonics and midnight-black clouds of piano tone, and realised with hallucinatory clarity by Borissova and Battarino. The composer (who co-produced the disc) must feel gratified at a performance of such character and conviction.