Anne-Sophie Mutter and Lambert Orkis have chosen to open the disc with the most apparently sunny of the sonatas, the Second, and you know from the winsome spread chord in bar 4, and Mutter’s coy reply, that these will be decidedly individual performances. To a certain extent Orkis plays straight man to Mutter’s diva, but they always know exactly where the other is, and the excellent engineering gives them equal billing.

Between them they put these sonatas through the X-ray machine at the airport. Every phrase is tested for strength, searched, even squeezed, for what? Emotional baggage, perhaps, or alien imports. Too often, like in the first movement of the Second, they find a bomb lying there instead of old Brahms’s sour cherries. The uneasy charm of the odd-man-out Scherzo in the Third goes overlooked, while the subsequent Adagio is scrutinised with such exhausting attention that its overall shape disappears. Itzhak Perlman (EMI, 6/95^R) uses portamento here too but he leans into the phrase rather than on it. Mutter’s vibrato is often heavier than we’re now used to, as well, quick and pressing in the Flesch mould but often bringing too much intensity too soon, as at the start of the Second’s finale, and its sudden withdrawal can leave an innocent phrase naked in the spotlight.

I’d be more enthusiastic, but it’s in the nature of Mutter’s very personal voice, which cajoles one moment and barks the next but rarely offers a plainer speech in between, that no matter the order of the sonatas, more than one at a sitting is too much. Maybe that gruff lack of compromise is true to one side of Brahms’s personality, but the man could smile too.