The name of Kyung Wha Chung automatically compels respect, and it might be argued that if any artist has earned the right to revisit repertoire that she first recorded over four decades ago, it’s Chung. Her 1977 account of the Franck Sonata with Radu Lupu on piano is universally, and rightly, regarded as a benchmark.

And perhaps it might have been better to leave it at that. This grandiloquent new recording with Kevin Kenner is still unquestionably the work of a violinist of extraordinary powers: a ripe, dark lower register, high notes of piercing brilliance and a commanding sense of the music’s drama and sweep. Kenner, too, draws some limpid sounds from his piano in both the Franck and the Fauré A major Sonata: again, the playing compels respect.

But I wouldn’t say it compels affection. There are mannered, self-conscious phrases; intonation that occasionally seems to distort under pressure, and a recorded balance that, intentionally or not, places Chung emphatically front and centre, at the expense of any real dialogue between the performers (the development section in the first movement of the Fauré is a particular missed opportunity).

True, there’s never any question that we’re in the presence of a major musical personality here, but interpretations that might have been convincing in the moment in a large concert hall don’t always transfer comfortably to disc. Certainly there’s little of the tender, confiding intimacy and quiet glow that Chung found with Lupu all those years ago, and while the makeweights – four belle époque miniatures, played with genuine affection – are altogether more loveable, this disc will primarily be of interest to fans of Kyung Wha Chung, rather than of Fauré or Franck.