It says something when the most familiar piece on a disc is Andrzej Panufnik’s Violin Concerto. In fact these four works all deserve to be better-known; and that includes the Panufnik. Like everything here, it receives lively and committed advocacy from Piotr Plawner and the Kammersymphonie Berlin under Jürgen Bruns; unlike everything else, it’s up against formidable recorded competition, not least from an impassioned Alexander Sitkovetsky on CPO and the work’s dedicatee Yehudi Menuhin, conducted by the composer. A case of the best being the enemy of the good.

But the first of Grażyna Bacewicz’s seven violin concertos is less readily available, and if Plawner is a less glamorous proposition, tonally, than Joanna Kurkowicz on Chandos, I liked Bruns’s brisk approach to Bacewicz’s neo-classical forms; there’s both wit and colour (listen to the way the bassoon burbles quietly away at 0'40" in the finale). If only the orchestra could have been a little more forward. But that’s a minor inconvenience in Alexandre Tansman’s Cinq Pièces: a delicious little suite of pastiches and miniatures, written for Josef Szigeti and including a very Lyadov-like musical-box scherzo. It bustles, it sparkles; there’s even a hint of a swing in the surprisingly funky basso ostinato finale.

And is this a premiere recording for Micha Spisak’s Andante and Allegro for violin and strings? It doesn’t say so, but it’s nonetheless well worth having this nine-minute diptych from a former pupil of Bacewicz. Plawner is searching and expressive in the recitative-like opening Andante and the long orchestral diminuendo before the spiky Allegro, superbly controlled. Worth hearing for the Tansman and Spisak alone, though the Bacewicz and Panufnik would be honourable second choices in any collection.