The booklet-note by no means downplays the promise of this disc. ‘One will discover with stupefaction an authentic masterpiece,’ it says of Philippe Gaubert’s Violin Sonata, a work composed in 1915, published five years later but here apparently recorded for the first time.

Stupefaction might be putting it a little strongly but the sonata is certainly revelatory of a creative talent worthy of attention. Some of the Gaubert works in this programme – the Trois Aquarelles for piano trio together with the Trois Pièces and the Lamento for cello and piano – featured on a Fuga Libera release in 2010 from the Trio Wiek, and identified a composer with a nice line in nostalgia and with a fluency and refinement redolent of Fauré. On that disc the Trois Aquarelles were played in Gaubert’s arrangement for flute, cello and piano – Gaubert (1879-1941) was himself a flautist, a pupil of the influential Paul Taffanel – but Jean-Marc Phillips-Varjabédian, Henri Demarquette and Marie-Josèphe Jude here play the original version with violin instead of flute, capturing the music’s essential Gallic grace, its translucency and its romantic impulse, qualities that also imbue the Quatre Esquisses for violin and piano.

The sonata, however, is made of more muscular stuff. From the emphatic gestures at the start, it would seem that Gaubert knew his Brahms and was not unaware of Franck in terms of harmony, but the music develops a personality of its own. This fine performance offers no reasons why it should so long have endured neglect.