Milhaud’s Quatre visages, composed in 1943 for the Pro Arte Quartet’s viola-player Germain Prévost, is a miniature suite offering generalised portraits of ladies from California and Wisconsin (where composer and player were living), and Brussels and Paris (from where they’d emigrated). These would be fairly unremarkable pieces but are enlivened by Milhaud’s interest in unusual tonal relationships. They are most attractively performed here, and frame the programme – Americans to start with, Europeans at the end.

The Viola Concerto isn’t, I think, one of Milhaud’s best works. Written in a more opaque style than the Visages, the outer movements certainly exhibit a Stravinskian motoric energy. But the continuous dissonance quickly becomes wearisome, lacking the poetic qualities of Schoenberg’s or Bartók’s complex harmonies. I also wonder if the solo viola is balanced too prominently in what is a chamber concerto.

Susanne van Els plays the demanding Ysaÿe Sonata with secure technique but I don’t feel she brings out its contrasts with sufficient clarity, nor does she realise its dramatic potential. Turn to Raphael Wallfisch (Cello Classics, 3/03) and you’ll hear more precise rhythms, a highly developed sense of timing and much greater tonal variety. The Hindemith is another matter. This solo sonata is a very strong work and Susanne van Els sustains the long melodic lines of the two slow movements in a most compelling way, attacking the intervening wild outburst with an appropriately ferocious energy.