A fine pianist and proficient violinist, Edmund Rubbra composed his First Violin Sonata in 1925 shortly after leaving the Royal College of Music. It's a notable achievement all round, whose first two movements exhibit a bittersweet lyricism that will strike a chord with anyone who has ever responded to, say, John Ireland's glorious Second Violin Sonata or the chamber music of Herbert Howells. By contrast, the 'Fugal Rondo' finale intriguingly pursues an altogether more sturdy, determinedly neo-classical mode of expression.
Written six years later in 1931, the Second Sonata already reveals a wider emotional scope, as well as a striking use of progressive tonality that at least one contemporary critic found 'disturbing and unnecessary'. Championed by the great Albert Sammons (who later recorded it for HMV), it will come as a substantial discovery to many, comprising an eventful, ever-evolving first movement, a strong, but never sentimental 'Lament' centrepiece, and a quasi-Bartokian finale (marked 'Strident and very rhythmic') whose wild exuberance seems to look forward across the decades to the last movement of this same figure's Violin Concerto of 1959.
The Second Sonata is framed here by the 1926 Four Pieces for beginners and the unaccompanied Variations on a Phrygian Theme that Rubbra composed in 1961 as a 50th birthday tribute for Frederick Grinke. The latter is a miracle of compact resourcefulness, but even finer, to my mind, is the Third Sonata, first given by Peter and Angela Mountain at the 1968 Cheltenham Festival. It's a simply wondrous piece, whose sense of purpose, rapt intuition and (above all) profound serenity irresistibly call to mind Rubbra's Eighth Symphony (with which it shares an adjacent opus number) - and fully deserving of the exalted advocacy it receives on this enterprising anthology. Indeed, Osostowicz and Dussek form an outstandingly sympathetic partnership, and they are handsomely served by impeccably balanced sound.
An invaluable and enormously rewarding release, in sum, enthusiastically recommended.'