Francesca Dego joins a select elite who have taken on these sonatas informed by the experience of playing Busoni’s bristling Violin Concerto. She grasps and conveys the aesthetic struggle in this music between a Brahmsian resolve and a capricious spirit of exhibitionism that finds its fullest expression in the Tarantella of the Piano Concerto. As her regular recital partner, Francesca Leonardi is sensitive to Dego’s breadth of phrasing in the slow movement of the First Sonata, with a fine appreciation that at such moments Busoni will not be rushed. Heavy with double-stopped writing like the Concerto, the finale also demands space along with momentum, and Dego supplies both in her springy phrasing.

She and Leonardi make the most compelling case I have encountered for the First Sonata as a destination in its own right rather than as a necessary stop-off on the route to the Second, which Busoni regarded as his Opus 1. The Chandos team place the listener in a front-row seat for some daringly dark and sinewy G-string tone in the late-Beethovenian musings of No 2’s opening movement, more confrontational in this regard than previous estimable Busonians such as Frank Peter Zimmermann (Sony, 7/06) and Lydia Mordkovitch (Chandos).

Dego’s approach of high contrasts makes sparkling, Mendelssohnian sense of the Scherzo, again leaving nothing in the practice studio in terms of dramatic commitment in the moment. In the long variation finale, Adolf Busch and Joseph Szigeti still cast a long shadow as pioneers on record, but Dego and Leonardi solve the paradox of Busoni the neoclassical Romantic and would-be visionary on their own terms. Again, Beethoven is a useful point of orientation for the heroic profile of this music, and their address to it, as unhurried and thoughtful as their Kreutzer variation movement in a DG sonata cycle of a decade ago – which on revisiting nonetheless reveals how far both musicians have developed in the interim.