Classic CD: Tamsin Waley-Cohen & Huw Watkins, Brahms

Tamsin Waley-Cohen & Huw Watkins (Signum).

Brahms, Violin Sonatas (Harmonia Mundi).

Last year, Tamsin Waley-Cohen visited New Zealand, adjudicating in Hamilton and Gisborne and giving a series of recitals with cellist Bartholomew LaFollette and pianist Tom Poster.

Her latest album, with her regular pianist Huw Watkins, more than compensates for missing out on the English violinist in concert. An imaginative collection of sonatas and shorter pieces by Karol Szymanowski (1882-1937) and Reynaldo Hahn (1874-1974) pairs two minor but highly individual composers; singular voices in stylistically contested times.

Waley-Cohen brings such intimacy to her performances that at times one could believe her 1721 Stradivarius was a breathing organism.

Set against Watkins' robust but sensitive keyboard contributions, she catches the rhetoric and romanticism of Szymanowski's 1904 Sonata yet, for his much later Nocturne, conveys its fragile vulnerability.

A lively Tarantella is delivered with an earthy vigour that reminds one of the folksong-influenced music of the Polish composer's Hungarian colleague, Bela Bartok.

The elegant Reynaldo Hahn, best known to some as the partner of writer Marcel Proust, is all willowy elegance and charm, with any troublesome emotions kept at arm's length. Listening to Waley-Cohen and Watkins ripple through the central movement of his 1926-27 Sonata, one can hear the clear and sparkling legacy of Camille Saint-Saens.

More New Zealanders heard and enjoyed Isabelle Faust when she played Mendelssohn with Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra in July, soon after the release of her superb recording of the Schumann Violin Concerto. Pianist Alexander Melnikov now joins her in a recital of Brahms and Schumann, including the very curious F.A.E Sonata, its four movements shared between Schumann, Brahms and the now-forgotten Albert Dietrich.

The special fusion of Faust's "Sleeping Beauty" Stradivarius and her pianist's 1875 Bosendorfer creates a tender melancholy in Schumann's Intermezzo from that Sonata, yet its Brahms Scherzo is every bit as fiery. Two Brahms Violin Sonatas may have their grand moments, but often the mood is one of autumnal understatement, echoed in the three Schumann Romances of Opus 94 that separates them.

Some oboe players may baulk at the takeover of a work written for them, but Faust and Melnikov make them sing like the sweetest of Lieder.

Verdict: Two recent releases celebrate the intimacy of violin and piano in tandem.

Tamsin Waley-Cohen & Huw Watkins (Signum)

Brahms, Violin Sonatas (Harmonia Mundi)