He was unfashionable before anyone knew who he was. As Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen were advancing their arguments about the serial organisation of sound, Roger Sessions, in 1953, two years after Schoenberg’s death, was getting hip to dodecaphony by implanting 12-note procedures inside his unaccompanied Sonata for Violin. But here’s the rub – the resulting piece actually sounds less self-consciously ‘modernist’ than his 1942 Duo for violin and piano, which bumps together influences from Ives, Hindemith and Stravinsky but ends up sounding like proto-Elliott Carter. Sessions’s Duo and Sonata for Violin are the centrepieces of this immaculately recorded and intrepidly played disc documenting all his chamber music for violin with, as a bonus, a ferociously dynamic performance of his gnarly, brawny Second Piano Sonata (1946) and a couple of piano miniatures.

Implausibly enough, the material that Sessions would eventually fashion into the Sonata was conceived originally as a symphony, which helps explain its four-movement structure and ambitious scale. Gesturally, it’s as boldly chiselled and in-your-face as Mount Rushmore. The clarity of Bach’s solo string music was palpably a guiding light, but in both Duo and Sonata Sessions relishes throwing his material over the cliff edge – shock moments of freefall that contrast winningly against the general air of serious-minded formality.

In the Duo counterpoint goes abruptly rogue, wriggling free of formal constraints. Elsewhere, holes are suddenly punched in the flow and, midway, the mother of all pedal points leads to a full-stop, then a jolting reboot. David Holzman and David Bowlin capture all the beautiful instability of a composer well worth catching up with – even if you’re fashionably late.