Eugène Ysaÿe was the charismatic and flamboyant successor to Wieniawski in the great French tradition of violin virtuosity. Yet he was to take the genre to new and giddy heights with his Six Sonatas for solo violin of 1924. Each sonata is dedicated to one of the rising stars of the younger generation of virtuosos and the work as a whole is in many ways a twentieth-century response to the Six Sonatas and Partitas for solo violin by Bach.

The two works for violin and piano on this recording are in a rather less virtuosic vein and date from some thirty years earlier. Rêve d'enfant is a short and tender lullaby in the spirit of Fauré, while the Poème élégiaque, itself dedicated to Fauré, combines a sublime atmosphere with unashamedly Wagnerian vision.