Three string-playing composers who hailed from the same Franco-Belgian school of string pedagogy – this album from John Wilson’s Sinfonia of London presents a continental counterpart to the ‘English Music for Strings’ album that made the ensemble’s name, twice (5/63, 2/21). Sonically, it’s a variation on what we know from Wilson’s group: a rich string texture that concerns itself more with sonority than blend and with the sort of tight vibrato that can, in conjuring the spectre of Stokowski, suggest a time warp.

It can also be bamboozling in the orchestral realisation of Enescu’s Octet, especially given a sound picture in which different parts of the polyphonic weave appear at different distances to the ear. I liked the effect on the spread chord at the end of the Enescu’s first movement – and the big chords at the end of the second – but was frustrated by a lack of humanity and intimacy elsewhere, and a feeling that sound was getting in the way of interpretation. It arguably works best in bringing a fractious tenderness to the third movement, but in the hurtling waltz of the fourth it sent me running for the clarity and acoustic warmth of Vilde Frang and friends (Warner, 10/18). Now there’s a real musical conversation.

The fit is better in the two other works. Perfume wafts over the fin de siècle chromaticism of Ysaÿe’s Harmonies du soir (though the music dates from 1924 and was probably more about the fin of the composer’s life) and that suits the SoL’s swooning little glissandos and sepia-toned romance, while some of the withdrawn playing is highly effective. In a very different way, the ensemble also get to the heart of Bacewicz at her most strident and neoclassical in the 1948 Concerto for String Orchestra so admired by her peers. Something of that sound, approach and in-your-face resonance channels the idea of a composer whose fearless iron will remains among her most impressive and appealing features.