The rich repertoire of the British 20th-century violin sonata, surely one of the richest national repertoires of its era, bears witness to the sheer variety and inspiration the medium elicited from its creators. Perhaps only the symphony or symphonic poem may compare with it in terms of fecundity. The third volume of ‘British Violin Sonatas’ on Chandos championed by Tasmin Little and Piers Lane adds two major sonatas – by York Bowen (1945) and John Ireland’s Sonata No 2 (1915 17) – to those of Bridge, Ireland, Bliss, Walton and Ferguson on Vols 1 and 2. On Somm, Clare Howick and Simon Callaghan have recorded two more major sonatas, by William Walton (1948) and Kenneth Leighton’s Sonata No 1 (1948). Both recordings, as it happens, share a recording of William Alwyn’s Sonatina (c1933); otherwise the two albums provide an array of attractive violin miniatures (itself a rich tapestry of invention) by Alan Rawsthorne and Lennox Berkeley, and premiere recordings of pieces by Gordon Jacob, Eric Coates and James Francis Brown.

John Ireland’s Sonata No 2 in A minor made a deep impression when Albert Sammons and William Murdoch first performed the work in London in 1917. Both performers were in military uniform, serving in the Grenadier Guards, a reminder that war was still furiously raging in Europe. Though the work radiates the composer’s individual sense of lyricism, a streak of anger and frustration runs through much of the work (notably the angular and acerbic opening of the first movement); its polemic stance almost certainly influenced EJ Moeran’s Sonata (1923) among others. Little brings out this stark contrast with impressive aplomb, the wonderful emergence of the effulgent second subject from the bleaker first being one such example. Lane’s nuanced handling of the capacious accompaniment is also insightfully executed; indeed, this is even more the case with Bowen’s imposing Sonata, Op 112, written at the end of the Second World War and dedicated to Peggy Radmall, later a prominent pedagogical figure in teaching the violin. It is a fiery, romantic work (witness the grand opening of the first movement) and both performers bring a rhythmic and emotional vigour to Bowen’s contrapuntal score, a piece which still betrays its strong late 19th-century roots.

Although more overtly 20th-century in origin, the sonatas by Walton and Leighton, both of which date from 1948, also betray potent romantic characteristics. Howick’s flexible tone is well suited to the fragile dissonance of Walton’s harmony and the prevalence of seventh intervals in the composer’s thematic shapes (rather similar to the Violin Concerto of 1939) is prudently combined with some tasteful application of portamento. Callaghan’s clean accompaniment provides a sympathetic backdrop, especially in the substantial character variations of the second movement. Leighton’s Sonata, written when the composer was barely 19, provides further evidence of his prodigious talent as a young man. Both performers are at their best in the striking slow movement, whose more pulsating, melancholy strains contrast with the more passionate élan of the outer movements.

The varied hues and shades of Howick’s timbral range are well suited to the array of short pieces that fill the rest of the disc. Written in 1934 as a wedding present for Rawsthorne’s first wife, Jessie Hinchcliffe, the Pierrette: Valse Caprice is a delightful, quirky piece of quicksilver, as is the moto perpetuo of Berkeley’s Toccata. This and the somewhat brooding Elegy, two of three miniatures written as Op 33 for Frederick Grinke in 1951, receive sympathetic interpretations, and the three little essays by Gordon Jacob, one of Stanford’s last pupils at the RCM, exude that typical polish of a composer now unjustly neglected. Little’s choice of miniatures includes Coates’s delicious First Meeting: Souvenir, originally written for Lionel Tertis’s viola in 1941 and revised two years later for violin; its soaring lines (stunningly sustained by Little’s fulsome tone) became an expression of familial affection for his son, Austin, on his 21st birthday. A more numinous iridescence haunts much of The Hart’s Grace, written for the Hertfordshire Festival of Music in 2016 by James Francis Brown (b1969).

Although Alwyn disowned his Sonatina for violin and piano of 1933 (an attitude he brought to much of his work before 1940), an examination of his music from this period reveals a process of rapid technical and stylistic assimilation (which Alwyn took for inadequacy) in which music of inventive promise belies the composer’s harsh self-criticism. Published in 2010, the Sonatina only received one performance in the composer’s lifetime, in 1935. Now, like the fortunes of the No 10 bus, two recordings have turned up at the same time. Little’s recording has an extrovert, feel-good factor, expressed in those long melodic lines she projects so instinctively, eminently supported by Lane’s robust gestures. Howick’s reading is a tad more introspective, less gesticulative perhaps; but there is much to admire in her more pensive interpretation of the slow movement and the crispness of her bowing in the jaunty finale.