A watercolour, Caravans by Eric Ravilious, pictured on the CD booklet, links the music of Bliss, Finzi and Gurney, whose lives were touched in varying ways by the Great War. Ravilious, who had served as a war artist in the Second World War, died when the aircraft he was in was lost over Iceland.

This recital is bookended by two compositions by Ian Venables: a Violin Sonata, cleverly adapted from an original for flute, now bedecked with a number of devices particular to the violin, and the Three Pieces, Op 11. The concluding Dance of Op 11 shares with the sonata’s second movement a jazzy manner further enhanced in the Dance with a strong irregular beat, embroidered with lyrical passages in a very beguiling manner. Chu‑Yu Yang and Eric McElroy make fine advocates for this appealing music, as they do the whole programme. Venable’s Sonata, written heart on sleeve, embraces melancholic, jazzy, romantic and English pastoral, so fashioning a work that, as Yang perceptively points out, balances ‘pastoral charm with introspective complexity’. It’s the same story in the Three Pieces, where the recording, impeccably balanced, captures the violin’s rhapsodic line and the bold keyboard sonorities in a glowing warmth.

Finzi’s Elegy, Op 22, the main refrain echoing his setting of Hardy’s poem of unrequited love ‘Lizbie Browne’, is quintessential Finzi, a lyrical outpouring of sustained loveliness, acknowledging in its quieter moments his sadness at the loss of three brothers in the Great War, a not uncommon family occurrence, as manifest on the roll of honour naming the fallen in many a town and country parish. This universal message is given a glowing performance, its powerful climax – the centrepiece of this moving work – adroitly handled.

The single surviving movement of Bliss’s Violin Sonata, a pithy and well-wrought composition, has one wishing he’d gone on to complete it. The performers capture the skittish nature of the opening material, which sounds like Alberich at work and contrasts with the boldly assertive big theme, where the piano-writing foreshadows Bliss’s ‘new world’ Piano Concerto of nearly a quarter of a century later.

Gurney’s works for violin and piano, appearing here for their initial outing, were composed in 1908‑09, before the vicissitudes of the Great War took their toll on his frail constitution. The titles are redolent of many a miniature from the early part of the 20th century, the composer acknowledging Elgar’s Salut d’amour in the opening Chanson triste, and concluding with an unexpected and delightful Humoresque. Hues of dark and light underpin Gurney’s Legende, the most substantial of these pieces, the romantic outpouring at the centre lovingly and powerfully portrayed by this fine duo. A recital that should be very popular.