It’s not easy to describe this album, a strange musical journey that takes us from North Africa to Hungary by way of the Modern Jazz Quartet and Russian Gypsy music. The gypsies provide something of a connecting motif but perhaps it’s better just to sit back and enjoy the brilliant, imaginative playing, with its interesting dialogue between the performance styles of jazz and classical music.

Lively pieces like For Nedim and The Pursuit of the Woman with the Feathered Hat go with a tremendous swing. More reflective tracks such as The Peasant Girl are not, perhaps, quite as convincing, though Barley’s own Yura gives off a powerfully melancholic aura. Many tracks involve improvisation – Julian Joseph’s piano-playing is outstanding – and I’d love to know whether Mullova, too, is improvising. She certainly sounds spontaneous but retains a disciplined polish from her classical training. Sometimes the stylistic mixture can be disconcerting.

A sequence of Bartók duos interleaved with Gypsy tunes is cleverly managed, but the conventional café-music harmonies sit very strangely alongside Bartók’s subtle evocations of rural idioms. The other Bartók sequence is more convincing, with short solo improvisations from Joseph, Clarvis and Walton creating a connecting narrative. However, the duos themselves lose something when played on violin and cello; the Mosquito Dance, for instance, sounds more menacing with two like instruments buzzing around one another.

The Kodály, of course, is wonderfully conceived for violin and cello, and Mullova and Barley give a fine performance, with some truly beautiful quiet passages, plenty of energy and passion, and an attractively light, playful style in the finale. I did long in places for the grander, more rhetorical manner adopted by Kennedy and Harrell (EMI, 5/00), but all in all this is a very stimulating programme, performed with flair and finesse.