This is a curate’s egg of a disc. Least successful, in the first two movements at least, is the performance of the G major First Sonata, the contemplative and intricately woven piece Brahms wrote at the end of the period which brought us the Violin Concerto and the Second Symphony. The sonata needs a more limpid line than Arabella Steinbacher provides and a clearer sense of the structure that underpins these inspired musings. This is also a louder and generally more pressurised performance than one is used to hearing. The finale is better, with a well-chosen tempo and a more sustained pulse. Some performances fall apart when the slow-movement theme returns midway through the movement, but not this one. Steinbacher also resists the temptation for G‑string wallowing in the finale of the songful A major Second Sonata. This is by some distance the best served of the three sonatas. The second movement’s winsome D minor Vivace may not sound very Slavonic but, then, not everyone thinks it is Slavonic.

Robert Kulek is not a celebrated Brahms pianist in his own right as some previous contenders have been: Serkin with Busch, Rubinstein with Szeryng, Katchen with Suk. At times he is more accompanist than fully fledged partner, though he is not helped by a recording which has the violin well forward and the piano slightly recessed. The D minor Third Sonata’s elfin scherzo certainly needs a more sharply drawn sound than we have here, as well as a quicker tempo. Steinbacher plays up the sonata’s gypsy melancholy but you need keener musical profiling if this late and endlessly subtle essay in Brahmsian Sturm und Drang is to make its mark.

The remaining piece is the fiercely characteristic Scherzo which the 20-year-old Brahms offered as his musical visiting card to the Schumann family circle in Düsseldorf in 1853. It is finely done. Uncomplicated Brahms is no problem for these players. It is the implied and unspoken elements in the music which sometimes eludes them.