There will be something new and intriguing for most chamber-music fans in this recital by Latvian violinist Baiba Skride and her pianist sister Lauma, which brings together relatively little-known violin pieces by the leading Nordic composers of the early 20th century. The most envelope-pushing work – and the one that makes the most of Baiba’s characteristic intensity of tone and muscular yet seamless phrasing – is the 1912 Sonata No 2 by Nielsen, its first movement a seething, searching bundle of mood-swings, its finale a deceptively relaxed waltz that in one striking passage anticipates the climbdown from one of the climaxes in the Fourth Symphony, begun two years later. The sisters are ideally matched, too, in four miniatures, Op 78, which find Sibelius in effortlessly lyrical mode, plus Grieg’s folk-inspired 1867 Sonata No 2 and the long, wistful lines of Stenhammar’s Sonata from 1900. Why are these works not played more often?
