This appealing trans-centennial musical diversion offers a good excuse to showcase three quality Polish sonatas that fall beyond the familiar realms of Chopin and Szymanowski. First, that most dignified darling of concert audiences at the end of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th, pianist-composer Ignacy Jan Paderewski, who wrote his Violin Sonata in A minor in 1882 during a difficult time in his life: his first wife had recently died and he was trying to provide proper care for his handicapped son. It’s an imposing piece that suggests parallels with various composers of the day, most notably Grieg, Brahms and César Franck. The forceful opening anticipates Fauré (ie the Second Piano Quartet of 1886) while the harmonically sophisticated second movement opens as if we’re eavesdropping midway through a conversation – intimate, ornate music, beautifully crafted. By contrast, the finale crosses Baroque-style assertiveness with just a hint of Spanish fire.

Zygmunt Stojowski was a pupil of both Delibes and Paderewski whose Symphony in D minor, Op 21, won first prize in a Paderewski Music Competition in Leipzig in July 1898. Stojowski’s First Violin Sonata, which appeared in print in Paris five years earlier, shares with Paderewski’s Sonata a certain restlessness but is perhaps marginally more amiable, certainly in the first movement. The second-movement Allegretto capriccioso resembles in its musical punctuation the second movement of Schumann’s A minor Sonata, meaning the elegant way it opens then coyly pulls back. The finale is a theme with variations, and it certainly helps that the theme itself is so noble while the variations provide numerous telling contrasts to savour.

Stojowski composed his Second Violin Sonata in the US in 1911 for the 20-year-old Polish violinist Artur Argiewicz (the work’s dedicatee). The opening again recalls the world of Fauré (retrospectively this time, especially the First Sonata). The following Intermezzo has an appealing simplicity about it, almost childlike in fact, whereas the Arietta third movement could easily serve as a lullaby. The Allegro giocoso finale admits a quota of extra warmth to nourish the playful mood. All three works are well recorded and sympathetically performed by violinist Piotr Plawner and pianist Piotr Saajczyk, while Jan Brachmann provides excellent annotations.