Jennifer Koh made a positive impression on disc with her Chandos recording of Menotti’s Violin Concerto. Here she offers an unusual and attractive grouping of works, based on the Fantasy, most flexible of forms. The warmth and imagination of her playing illuminates pieces that need shaping with a positive hand. She is ideally partnered by Reiko Uchida, who is wonderfully crisp and agile in writing that is not always grateful for the player.

The opening trills of Schubert’s works are a case in point, leading to a close-balanced and acid-toned violin entry. Happily that is the only such instance and soon the strength of the performance is firmly established. Schumann’s Fantasy is one of his last works, written for Joachim at the same time as the Violin Concerto. It is heard here not in the usual orchestral form but in the composer’s piano transcription. Inevitably one misses the orchestral contrasts, but Koh’s intensity and the rhythmic point of the duo’s playing gives the piece a sense of fantasy in its broader sense.

Schumann was plainly looking back to early examples of this free form, and so too was Schoenberg with his Phantasy, also a late work. He completed the violin part before he even began to add an accompaniment. Koh rightly treats it as a post-Romantic work, deeply expressive despite the uncompromising atonal idiom. A final solo work, Trinity, is in effect a lyrical meditation unrelated to Ornette Coleman’s jazz background, with a folk flavour at times, ending disconcertingly in mid-air. A welcome addition nonetheless to a varied and often neglected body of works.