The word here is ‘fearless’. You may not have expected to see the words fearless and Saint-Saëns in the same sentence, drinking your coffee on any given Sunday morning. Monumental, grandiose, charming perhaps – but fearless? Nevertheless, the works for violin, piano and harp offered here are played with fire and commitment, and are often pushed right to the limit.

Saint-Saëns himself expected this, writing to his publisher in 1885 about the First Sonata: ‘A comet-like sonata that will ravage the universe by sowing terror and rosin in its path.’ He certainly wasn’t wrong. I love this earnest and swelling opening, like surging waves in a turbulent but perhaps warm seascape. The insightful accompanying notes tempt us with the possibility that this piece may have been the inspiration for Proust’s fictional ‘Vinteuil Sonata’ in À la recherche du temps perdu.

Here Cecilia Zilliacus offers us a violin tone that is vibrant and guttural at the same time. Her warm and sometimes wonderfully husky portamentos are such a beautiful complement to this music. But this isn’t just one kind of fearlessness – there is fire and there is ice. Pianist Christian Ihle Hadland offers the ice, the crystalline precision and sparkle: the lilting arpeggiations, the flashing passagework and the glittering cascades.

They have a tough act to follow. Both sonatas were premiered by Saint-Saëns, himself a virtuoso pianist – Liszt was said to be highly impressed by his playing. Even more impressively, for the first performance of the Second Sonata the composer was joined by Sarasate, the dedicatee of several of Saint-Saëns’s violin works, including two concertos and the Introduction and Rondo capriccioso.

Another successful partnership is apparent between Zilliacus’s violin and the harpist Stephen Fitzpatrick. The much-loved Berceuse is here offered as a harp transcription by Fitzpatrick himself. It is a lovely combination, with textures in turn dramatic and refreshing. The harp’s role moves between beautifully supporting and scintillating, and the violin offers some earnest speech-like lyrical moments. In terms of the sound, I really appreciate the combination of the intimate and the expansive at once – it’s a beautiful and really effective sound world.

I was inspired to go back to listen to recordings of Saint-Saëns performing, and indeed Sarasate, and I can see that this clarity and precision, the diamond-like execution – a sort of vertical expressivity – seems entirely in the spirit of Saint-Saëns the pianist himself. The violinist gives us all the heat we need, and in either pairing their fire is white-hot, iridescent, and it is impressive and beguiling indeed.