Played at its best, the Franck Violin Sonata presents itself as an almost through-composed piece, the wildly varying musical ideas held together by an unseen hook that allows a perfectly smooth passage through the piece from beginning to end. If it is overplayed, though, that invisible line is broken and the phrases become a series of unrelated truncations, joined together by intense acceleration and, often, extreme compensatory braking. Despite the sonata’s hardy nature, it is nevertheless this sense that permeates Arabella Steinbacher’s performance – particularly in the first movement, which feels very much as if everything has been fully disclosed before the end of the exposition – although it is not that of Robert Kulek, whose accompaniment is neither more nor less intense than it needs to be. As a result, his statesmanlike role in the performance feels more like gentle mitigation than the musical incitement of a response.

They are much more evenly matched, happily, in Strauss’s more straightforwardly Romantic Sonata in E flat, which – although not the same masterpiece as the Franck – showcases Steinbacher’s profound lyrical talent to much purer effect. Even though this sonata shares more with Strauss’s chamber music than his larger-scale work, the unadulterated rhapsodic nature of the piece (set against a backdrop of extreme technicality) results in a performance that sits far more comfortably not only with Steinbacher herself but with her sophisticated musical relationship with Kulek. This gives it a greater sense of elasticity, integrity and natural evolution than the Franck, which makes it easier to engage with and invest in.