Look on Ernest Bloch’s reputation, ye mighty, and despair. In 1957 Bloch merited an entire chapter to himself in Alec Robertson’s Chamber Music (Shostakovich got a single paragraph and Janáček a grand total of three sentences). Now: well, if his violin sonatas aren’t entirely unknown on disc, they’re not exactly appearing at the same rate as, say, recordings of Enescu or Ysaÿe – composers who inhabit a comparably fervent, virtuoso late-Romantic sound world.

Fervent is certainly the word for the way Nurit Stark and Cédric Pescia attack the ferocious ostinato that opens the First Sonata: you can hear steel gears whirring, every bit the work of the composer whose self-portrait stares maniacally from the disc’s cover. Stark and Pescia aren’t afraid to get their hands dirty, and Stark’s lower strings sometimes buzz against the fingerboard. But there’s fantasy here too, and the pair have a remarkable knack for holding these elements in balance – and finding exactly the right tone-colour at any given instant, whether Pescia’s metallic left-hand motor-rhythms or Stark’s throaty harmonics in the central Molto quieto.

These qualities really come into their own in the single-movement Second Sonata, where Stark immediately finds a sonority of concentrated sweetness. This music breathes the same perfumed air as Szymanowski’s Mythes, but just as striking as the quiet intimacy of Stark and Pescia’s dialogue is the masterful control with which they pace the sonata’s 20-minute arc. Pescia’s command of both form and colour also makes for a compelling account of the Piano Sonata. It would have been easy for Claves’s engineers to let the piano sound on this disc degenerate into a thunderous wash of bass: in fact, the clarity and balance throughout serve the music handsomely.