Rather against my will, and indeed against my better judgement, I found myself guiltily enjoying this recording. There’s so much to be said against it on extramusical grounds. The cynicism of the presentation, for a start: the booklet includes seven photographs of the beautiful Miss Jansen in four dresses, one of them a diaphanous décolleté number embroidered with butterflies. Then, opposite a black-and-white version of the latter in soft focus, there’s a note by the violinist of numbing and ungrammatical banality (‘While trying to be faithful to each score, emotion and passion are very important to me in performance’). And Decca is charging full price for 39 minutes of music.

So to approach the music in a jaundiced frame of mind is understandable, and first impressions are not good: lush, squeeze-box phrasing in the opening tutti of ‘Spring’ and a distant harpsichord continuo put me in mind of old recordings by I Musici. Equally unstylish are the gratuitous pizzicati in the last movement of ‘Autumn’, where the frightened game is trying to escape horse and hound.

But the playing grows on you. Oddly enough, the absence of a ripieno string group doesn’t make the performance small-scale. Janine Jansen and her colleagues play with splendid vigour in the outer movements, and Jansen herself weaves a line of great beauty in the Largos and the Adagio. There’s a fair amount of rubato, especially in the first movement of ‘Autumn’, which certainly holds the attention. The dialogue between violin and organ continuo in the ‘cuckoo’ section of ‘Summer’ is a delight.

I don’t know. Jansen is a brilliant player, whom I’d like to hear in Glazunov or Bruch. Worth begging or borrowing; not stealing, perhaps.