Hard-bitten music critics tend to approach family get-togethers with caution – especially when they claim to bridge the folk/art-music divide. But this is a superior example of the genre: even if Moldovan violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja’s booklet-notes verge on the self-congratulatory, her playing, and that of everyone else involved, leaves you in no doubt that refined sophistication and raw intensity can fuse, setting the music on fire.

Rapsodia is Viktor Kopatchinsky’s folk-music ensemble, in which his wife Emilia – Patricia’s mother – plays violin and viola. The examples of their work, which alternate with the art-music items, are all under five minutes long and show a rich, multi-layered musical thinking which is never more mesmerising than when Viktor’s cimbalom is to the fore. The most rhapsodic composition on the disc is George Enescu’s Third Violin Sonata – “in the style of popular Romanian music” – expansive, just managing not to lose its musical threads and with an extraordinarily melodramatic ending. Ravel’s Tzigane might seem the odd piece out in this programme yet, with the piano part transcribed for cimbalom, it comes across as no less earthily characterful than the disc’s most concentrated and un-folklike item, Kurtág’s set of eight tiny duos for violin and cimbalom.

Kurtág’s riveting miniatures are the perfect complement to Enescu’s expansiveness. In addition, Kopatchinskaja offers two short pieces in which she duets with herself – Ligeti’s Duo and a fragment of Crin by Jorge Sanchez-Chiong which has her declaiming a text while playing her violin. This well-recorded disc is a breath of the freshest musical air.