Joseph Szigeti and Egon Petri play Brahms. (EMI References, mid-Price)

The small store of EMI's electrical recordings of Joseph Szigeti are among this great Hungarian violinist's finest. The major work on this centenary-related Brahms reissue, is the almost chamber music-like 1928 recording of the Violin Concerto, made with the Halle Orchestra under Ireland's most celebrated conductor, Hamilton Harty, a long-time associate of Szigeti - back in 1908, Harty had written his Violin Concerto for Szigeti, then still in his teens. However, the gem of the disc is the soulful, unsentimental partnership with Egon Petri in Brahms's D minor Violin Sonata. In the Paganini Variations Petri's solo playing is sensitive, daring, shapely. The new transfers are smooth but the items with violin have been deprived of body and vividness.