According to Jan Swafford (Johannes Brahms; Macmillan: 1998), the Second Violin Sonata ‘paints a picture of Brahms at his desk yearning for Hermine’, the lady in question being en route at the time to Brahms’s summer fastness on Lake Thun. He was certainly dreaming of something, you might think, after listening to the young (b1978) Albanian violinist Rudens Turku. There is more amabile than allegro to his first movement, which sets the tone for the recital. He brings a fruity G string to bear on Brahms’s many espressivo instructions and captures the offhand, anti-finale nature of the concluding Allegretto very nicely.

Schumann’s marking for the first movement of his First Sonata, ‘with passionate expression’, could stand for all three works on the disc, but I sense a concern to keep the emotion in check. Turku studied with Ana Chumachenko, a Munich-based guru whose pupils include Lisa Batiashvili and Arabella Steinbacher; in common with them, clean-limbed phrases and forthright accents are hallmarks of his playing. He is quick off the fingerboard and does not go after the big swell, so portamento and rubato are never more than tastefully employed.

All that sounds a bit mean, but the Franck Sonata is best suited to this intelligent and self-contained approach. Even so, Franck’s iambic rhythms and unfulfilled melodies reach a controlled passion under the fingers of Kaja Danczowska and Krystian Zimerman (DG – nla) that is as yet beyond Turku and his excellent pianist Milana Chernyavska. They don’t need to let it all hang out; maybe just live a little.