Naxos Historical’s series devoted to the recordings of Yehudi and Hephzibah Menuhin continues apace with this unusual programme bringing together the Franck and Lekeu Violin Sonatas with Beethoven’s third sonata. Yehudi and Hephzibah Menuhin were the first to record the large-scale Sonata in G major by the tragic Belgian composer Guillaume Lekeu, who died a day after his 24th birthday, and so their names will always be associated with it. The recording presented here was the first – and generally acknowledged as the best – of two made by Menuhin. Yehudi first learnt the Sonata by Lekeu’s teacher Franck in 1927 at Enescu’s little French country house, and the Sonata ‘became so imbued with the place that I only have to play it to see again the room on the upper floor, Enescu at the upright piano, and beyond the open window, the smiling French countryside’ some of that feeling finds its way into the recording heard here. The Beethoven Sonata here was the fruit of Yehudi’s second visit to Australia, where Hephzibah was living on a sheep farm with her first husband. The joy of that 1940 summer, enhanced by the birth in Melbourne of Yehudi and Nola Menuhin’s second child Krov, can be heard in the relaxed performance that brother and sister gave in the Sydney studio. `Throughout his long and illustrious career, Yehudi Menuhin was rarely blessed with an accompanist as sensitive and sympatico as his sister, Hephzibah, who really deserves equal billing in this latest issue in Naxos Historical’s valuable series of momentous reissues. … An outstanding example of two superb individuals playing, magically, as one.´ The Observer on Vol. 1 (8110771).