As is made clear with her extensive annotations, Maria Shetty did not undertake performance of Hindemith’s sonatas for viola lightly, and these recordings bear witness to her commitment and dedication in works necessarily at the centre of the modern repertoire for the instrument.

Written soon after demobilisation, the First Sonata (1919) finds Hindemith working through the vestiges of late-Romantic expression. Its three movements proceed continuously so that the opening Fantasie unfolds an eloquent theme whose formal and expressive possibilities are mined in the ensuing Thema and Variations, this process intensified in the Finale (with Variations), where it takes on rhetorical force before finding resolution in a decisive march.

With his First Solo Sonata (1922), Hindemith embraced a modernist aesthetic finding accord in (as Shetty rightly points out) a neo-Baroque outlook with Bach as its lodestar. Here an Adagio of sustained intensity is preceded by two brief but vehement movements, then rounded off with one whose introspection exudes confiding fatalism. This is not shared by the Second Sonata (also 1922), whose three movements relate, however obliquely, to Classical precedent. Hence an acerbic sonata design, then a pensive ‘song without words’ that is brusquely countered by the final rondo, which culminates in a driving impetus more readily associated with Bartók.

Throughout, Shetty is at one with Monika Wilińska-Tarcholik in her bringing a humanity to this music beyond its technical dexterity. Lawrence Power with Simon Crawford-Phillips is more restrained but no less perceptive, and Kim Kashkashian with Robert Levin persuasively collates all of Hindemith’s viola sonatas in what remains a first choice. Hopefully the present artists will pursue their exploration in another volume that may already have been recorded.