A new CD from Michael Collins is like walking into a three-star Michelin restaurant: you don’t know exactly what’s on the menu but you know whatever is on offer is going to taste wonderful. On this occasion, he offers an extended first course of amuse bouches followed by a substantial main course in the form of the Franck Sonata. The former come in the shape of 13 short works, transcriptions of violin, flute and cello pieces, of the kind that Kreisler, Casals and other great instrumentalists of their era might have ended their recitals. The longest of these is Philippe Gaubert’s Fantaisie (1911) at 7'29" and the only original clarinet-and-piano work on the disc.

The remaining 12 titles are all arrangements by Collins’s partner (‘accompanist’ seems inadequate here) Michael McHale, a role he has fulfilled in superb style on the duo’s two earlier volumes of ‘The Lyrical Clarinet’: doff of the chapeau. If you wondered whether you really need a recording of Clair de lune played on the clarinet, the first few bars of the opening track will persuade you (I can see this becoming a firm favourite on certain classical music stations). Whether the two Kreisler titles are as successful is a moot point. Everyone will have their own favourites and preferences. Perhaps the biggest surprise, even though the piece started life as a song, is the completely convincing Liebestraum No 3.

The arrangement for clarinet and piano of Franck’s Violin Sonata is by Collins himself (for clarinet in A, that is, rather than B flat). It is the first commercial recording I have come across of this masterpiece played on the clarinet, though it works so well with only a few minor adjustments that you wonder why it has not been attempted before (or so seldom). There are only a handful of double-stops to be substituted, and few passages that rise beyond the clarinet’s upper range and which have to be taken down an octave. It’s a triumph. True, there are times when one misses the violin’s impassioned intensity in passages in the second and fourth movements (though McHale’s deft and lucid contribution is by no means underplayed) but, once again, one has to salute the extraordinary facility and irresistibly seductive, lyrical grace of Michael Collins’s playing, surely one of his instrument’s greatest living exponents.