In a sense it’s a surprise that Tasmin Little and Piers Lane have only now got round to the Brahms violin sonatas. Certainly their long familiarity with both the music and each other’s approach to it pays dividends and from the off you know you’re in safe hands. These are essentially traditional-style performances, relishing the generosity of Brahms’s full textures and not undertaking the kind of vibrato-lite experimentation of some.

Little relishes the many instances of Brahms’s writing in the violin’s alto register and Lane is always responsive to the violin’s colourings and shadings, fining his sound right down whenever needed. Lane is sensitive in the piano introduction to the slow movement, too, though few can rival Bronfman in terms of sheer detailing here. The changeability of the Second Sonata’s middle movement, on the other hand, is done with a gleeful aplomb, even if I wanted a degree more sense of energy in the same sonata’s finale, which here is a little plush compared to Gioconda de Vito and Tito Aprea or Augustin Dumay and Maria João Pires.

To my mind it’s the Third Sonata that throws up the biggest reservations – the opening is less magically withdrawn than some, while the hymnic Adagio doesn’t have the rapture of de Vito with Edwin Fischer or Dumay with Pires. Though Lane is supple in his rendering of the Scherzo, as a whole it lacks the sense of mischief found in such abundance in Pires’s playing, while the Little/Lane final Presto agitato is good-humouredly vigorous without finding the subtlety of tone that makes the Znaider/Bronfman partnership so special.