A window on the past facilitated by two brilliant young players. The prodigy violinist Johan Dalene (born August 2000) claims a level of tonal distinction that many of his peers, even the best of them, lack: he knows how to use vibrato and portamento in pursuit of a singing line (he’s no mere imitator of past players), and when it comes to brief morceaux, such as most of these are, he invests each phrase with a wealth of feeling and style. He tells us in his note that he got to know them during long family car journeys, then went on to learn them in competitions and for concerts. In the opening number, a bigger piece altogether, Ravel’s gypsy-inflected Tzigane, Dalene makes free both with the melodic gestures and the rests between them, and come the improvisational entrance of the piano at 5'01" when the music moves into the folksy friss mode, pianist Peter Friis Johansson makes a bee-line for some virtuoso piano-writing, emphasising the rhapsodic element as much as Dalene has done already. The super-fast closing pages really take fire, as they do for the programme’s closing selection, Franz Waxman’s technicolour Carmen Fantasy (very different to Sarasate’s), which beyond the seductive Card Scene (the Fantasy’s high point, at least for me) and Seguidilla works itself into a real frenzy.

The recital’s centrepiece is Saint-Saëns’s elegantly playful Introduction and Rondo capriccioso, a nicely turned performance, though Heifetz and Grumiaux remain immovable benchmarks. As to the rest of the programme, Tchaikovsky’s three-movement Souvenir d’un lieu cher (‘Memory of a dear place’) opens and closes with unforgettable melodies (Meditation in D minor, so beloved of David Oistrakh, and Melodie in E flat), both played by Dalene with plenty of heart, at its heart an athletic Scherzo in C minor. The remaining items are Massenet’s evergreen Thaïs Méditation, Falla’s Spanish Dance No 1 from La vida breve, Kreisler’s Ysaÿe-style Recitativo and Scherzo-Caprice for solo violin (Ysaÿe was a friend of Kreisler’s and the piece is dedicated to him) and a rarity, the Allegro molto, No 4 of Six Pieces for violin and piano by the gifted 19th-century Swedish violinist and composer Amanda Maier. So a very varied programme, winningly played and realistically recorded. I look forward to hearing more from Dalene, maybe in a programme of rare Romantic sonatas.