Fenella Humphreys conveyed tangible identity with Sibelius through her recent accounts of the Violin Concerto and all six Humoresques (8/21), with this follow-up volume finding her equally perceptive in a substantial overview of the composer’s output for violin and piano.

As Andrew Barnett indicates in his booklet note, Sibelius wrote little for this duo in his maturity until the First World War, when financial constraints produced various miniatures in swift succession. Sets of four (1917) and five (1918) pieces are typical in their technical fluency and undemanding material, Humphreys finding cohesion in sequences centred on the eloquent poise of Op 78’s ‘Religioso’ or the robust gait of Op 81’s ‘Menuetto’. By the time of Danses champêtres (1924) Sibelius had written both his remaining symphonies; and while these pieces barely hint at such expressive intensity, they capture a limpid wistfulness found in Sibelius’s lighter music – not least the taciturn ‘Tempo moderato’. The final sets (1929), almost the last music published in his lifetime, find Sibelius exploring those harmonic and rhythmic innovations of Bartók and Stravinsky but also Nielsen in Op 115’s sardonic ‘Humoreske’ or Op 116’s acerbic ‘Danse caractéristique’; their emotional obliquity maybe intimating the mythical ‘Eighth Symphony’.

Humphreys and Joseph Tong again make a persuasive case for this music, heard to advantage at Cedars Hall in Wells. Pekka Kuusisto and Heini Kärkkäinen are equally appealing on their ‘Musical Soirée at Ainola’ (Ondine), omitting the Andante cantabile (1887) that here judiciously represents the younger composer, but no prospective listener is likely to go wrong with this new recording.