The heart-on-sleeve romanticism of Bax’s First Violin Sonata reflects the composer’s passionate loveaffair with the Ukrainian girl Natalia Skarginska in the winter of 1909-1910. Bax soon replaced two of the movements, but the vibrant originals survive, and are here recorded for the first time. Bax still writes romantically in the more compact Third Sonata, but here the object of his affections is surely the country and people of Ireland.