Helen Callus, a viola-player with exceptionally warm tone and perfect intonation, here offers a miscellany of transcriptions. She celebrates a sequence of viola pioneers, not just Lionel Tertis, the most widely acknowledged of the British players, but such figures as the Russian Vadim Borrisovsky and William Primrose from the generation following Tertis.

The first of the eight main items offers Borrisovsky’s transcriptions of five pieces from Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet, the portrait of the “Young Juliet” alternately light and sparkling and richly lyrical, while “The Dance of the Knights” is played with infectious swagger; only the Balcony Scene is a little disappointing in its brevity. Borrisovsky also provides the transcriptions of songs and piano pieces by Tchaikovsky while Callus plays Primrose’s transcription of None but the lonely heart with plenty of double-stopping.

Shorter items include a very effective Romance by Vaughan Williams and a Reverie by Wieniawski, both published after the composers’ deaths. Three pieces by Frank Bridge, a viola-player, demonstrate the understanding which a player of the instrument can bring, while the formidable Freda Swain, described as a “headmistressy figure”, offers a genre Song at Evening and Lionel Tertis is represented by the lyrical Sunset.

Schumann said his late piece might be played by a range of instruments, not just the horn for which it was designed, and Chopin is represented by a Waltz and his most famous Etude, which was turned into a song, “So deep is the night”; the transcription is provided by Callus’s husband, Michael Liberman, also a viola-player. A fine collection, superbly performed, very well recorded and sensitively accompanied.