'These works by English composers make for an attractive programme. Foyle and Burnside are a well-matched, their elegantly delineated playing ensuring that even the most passionate of passages never tip into sentimentality. This approach is particularly well suited to Adès's eerie Suite from The Tempest ... the Chansons de Nuit and de Matin brim with tenderness.'

'Elgar was living in Sussex when he composed his 1918 Violin Sonata, no doubt conscious of wartime artillery fire across the Channel. There is, however, a distanced escapism in this music, even in its darker moments, which British-Dutch violinist Michael Foyle latches onto in a genuinely thoughtful performance with pianist Iain Burnside. Where the passion peaks - the impatience of the opening, the intense heart-filled peak of an otherwise placid Romance, the finale’s lofty surges - composure, even inner peace, still dominate its emotional core. No surprise, then, that the delicate tracery of Thomas Adès’ Suite from The Tempest enjoys equally touching treatment, nor that William Walton’s 1940s Violin Sonata evokes so much of the lyrical tenderness, bittersweet texturing and euphoric joy the composer invested in it. Foyle returns to Elgar for his final tracks, the combined enchantment of Chanson de Nuit and Chanson de Matin.'

'There are many recordings of Elgar's Violin Sonata, but coming to it fresh after some time away, I heard things anew in this wonderfully authoritative account.

Opening this excellently recorded Delphian disc, the sonata is played with a beautiful sensitivity, its lines phrased with real understanding – nowhere more so than in the Romance slow movement, with its rippling piano accompaniment. Every movement is delivered with delectable expression, Burnside's accompaniment judiciously weighed against Foyle's tone, and the emotional core of the piece is never in doubt. Far from a wistful late farewell, this is playing full of nervous energy, with the war years and private sorrow never far beneath the surface. The intimacy is palpable.'

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'Wiry, sinewy, intense, urgently energetic: to say that Elgar’s Violin Sonata opens in the hands of Michael Foyle and Iain Burnside sounding a little less richly Romantic than usual is an understatement. But this thoroughly fits with the piece having been written in 1918, amid personal bereavement and international trauma. That intense blend of rhetoric, melancholy and lyricism can also be found in its partner works here – Walton’s Violin Sonata, written in the equally turbulent aftermath of World War II in 1947–9, around the time of the death of his partner Alice Wimborne, and Thomas Adès’s dramatic suite from his opera The Tempest.

Other highlights in the Elgar include the way the central Romance’s initial elfin mystery warms into something profound and fully human – more elderly lovers by the fireside than will-o’-thewisp in the woods.

The Adès brings fast-switching, wide-ranging colours – try the duo’s tautly mesmeric way with Ariel’s ‘Full fathom five’. And the Walton unfolds with complete naturalness, the phrasing tilting so organically between long-lined lyricism and nimble conversation. The album closes with Elgar at his most intimate, his songs to night and morning expressed with touching simplicity.'