An unqualified good news story in recent years has been the steady increase in recordings of the music of Grażyna Bacewicz: to the extent that gaps in her discography (especially as regards her chamber music) are getting harder and harder to find. Pleasingly, this disc contains two premiere recordings: Legend, a brooding wrong-note Wieniawski homage, and the short but haunting Song, written by the teenage Bacewicz in 1927, and which deserves to become a standard encore. Both are played with affection and style by Jaga Klimaszewska and Mateusz Rettner.

But the four sonatas are the main story here, and these performers go at them with noteworthy selflessness. Which is not to say that they lack either energy or poetry. Both players are adept at conveying the brooding post-Romantic atmosphere so typical of Bacewicz’s music, as well as the moments of limpid beauty. The inquietamente marking of the Fifth Violin Sonata’s finale is impressively realised, and both players have an instinct for Bacewicz’s proportions: sweeping when they need to be, these readings never flag or sag. Rettner’s performance of the rarely recorded First Piano Sonata has an impressive urgency and command. He brings a sly wit to Bacewicz’s more deadpan moments.

On balance, I think I’d give these performances the edge over Annabelle Berthomé-Reynolds’s recent complete Bacewicz sonata cycle, though Klimaszewska isn’t without her shaky moments either, and I’d have liked a little more sparkle in Bacewicz’s scherzos: after all, she’s one of the 20th century’s great musical humorists. No one, yet, has quite ‘sold’ Bacewicz’s violin sonatas with the panache that Lydia Mordkovitch brings to the First and Third Sonatas on Chandos. But there’s plenty here to reward the explorer.