The violinist Ralph Holmes had a unique position among virtuosos of his generation but his early death in 1984 at the age of 47 left us with all too few mementos of his artistry. This Heritage disc, mainly drawn from live BBC broadcasts, fills an important gap, giving some idea of the breadth of his repertory, not only in the classics (he gave several hundred performances of Beethoven’s Violin Concerto) but in 20th-century music too.

Aided by the crisp playing of Peter Dickinson, he gives a winningly fresh account of Beethoven’s Spring Sonata, with a slow movement movingly delivered in hushed tension, a beautifully sprung account of the brief Scherzo and free-flowing accounts of the outer movements.

Bartók’s Solo Violin Sonata (remastered from a 1977 Argo recording), was written for Yehudi Menuhin in 1944, when Bartók, as an exile in New York, was seriously neglected. Holmes plays it with seeming ease; if the result may seem on a small scale and lacking a little in tension, that is largely a question of the rather backward recording balance. What matters is that every note is crystal clear, making evident Bartók’s mastery.

Bax’s Third Violin Sonata was written for the Hungarian-born violinist Emil Telmányi in 1927 and is in two substantial movements. Typically, the three main themes of the first movement have a haunting Celtic flavour, reflecting the composer’s love of Ireland and things Irish, while the second movement, described by Dickinson in his note as ‘a barbaric dance’, has none of the venom of Bartókian examples of musical barbarity but rather an attractive amiability.

The little Delius work which comes as a charming tailpiece is a curiosity. Delius wrote this lullaby as a solo piano piece in 1922 and added an upper melodic line ‘to be hummed or played by a violin using a mute’. Altogether, a splendid tribute to Holmes.