Here we have a pair of albums that take very different approaches to Ravel’s slender output for violin. On Aparté, Elsa Grether and David Lively tackle his complete works for violin and piano, together with arrangements by other hands, including two not previously recorded: Gustave Samazeuilh’s version of the slow movement from the G major Piano Concerto and a transcription by André Asselin of the Five O’Clock Foxtrot, itself an orchestral arrangement of the duet between the Teapot and Chinese Cup from L’enfant et les sortilèges.

For Challenge Classics, meanwhile, Lina Tur Bonet looks at Ravel’s friendship with the violinist Hélène Jourdan-Morhange (1888-1961), who first came to his attention in 1917, when he heard her play in his Piano Trio, and whom he nicknamed Moune. She went on to give the premieres of both his Sonata for violin and cello and Berceuse sur le nom de Gabriel Fauré in 1922. Shortly afterwards, the onset of rheumatoid arthritis forced her to abandon her career, though she worked with Ravel as an advisor on both his G major Sonata, of which she was the dedicatee, and Tzigane. She went on to become a well-known musicologist, publishing a study of Ravel in 1945.

Inevitably, the two programmes have a number of pieces in common, albeit with contrasting performances. Grether’s tone is sweet, her playing elegant and subtle, while Tur Bonet, using gut strings and a period bow, has a darker sound and a less poised, albeit at times more immediate style. Lively is a wonderfully gracious pianist, and he and Grether do lovely things with the G major Sonata, particularly the bittersweet Allegretto and the dexterous closing Perpetuum mobile. Tur Bonet and Pierre Goy, however, the latter playing a 1935 Hautrive piano from the Musical Instruments Museum in Brussels, sound altogether sleazier and perhaps more appealing in the central ‘Blues’.

Tur Bonet’s Tzigane yields pride of place to Grether’s in terms of authority and panache, but where Lively uses the standard piano score, Tur Bonet and Goy give us a rare opportunity to hear Ravel’s alternative version for luthéal, a precursor of the modern prepared piano that uses an attachment that can make the instrument alternately sound like a harpsichord or cimbalom: the textures and sonorities that result are indeed striking. Whether you prefer Grether’s nostalgic Berceuse, meanwhile, to Tur Bonet’s more moody introversion is probably a matter of taste, as both are excellent.

Where the two albums pull apart, there is also much to admire and enjoy in both cases. Marco Testori joins Tur Bonet for the Sonata for violin and cello, austere and uncompromising, the trenchant humour of the Scherzo nicely done, the slow movement sparse yet deeply affecting. Grether and Lively, meanwhile, prove persuasive with the lengthy single movement that is all that remains of Ravel’s early (1897) A major Sonata, unpublished until 1975: there’s plenty of sweep and passion here in a work that has great charm but wears its debt to Fauré too overtly on its sleeve.

Many of the arrangements are lovely as well, particularly Lucien Garban’s exquisite version of the Mélodies hébraïques, which Grether plays with deeply felt but understated melancholy. Be warned that Tur Bonet is saddled with woefully edited booklet notes that refer to the Berceuse as being ‘sur le nome de Gabriel Fauré’ and can’t spell Jourdan-Morhange’s name right. Both albums are fascinating, however, though Grether’s is fractionally the finer of the two.