‘Gradually, almost surreptitiously and without really noticing what we were doing, Hephzibah and I had started to play together at home,’ Yehudi Menuhin wrote. ‘It wasn’t a deliberate decision but simply a natural extension of our relations as brother and sister: the partnership came about without our having to make it happen.’ When the two first played in public, he was 18 and she was 14. Their partnership would endure, with various enforced separations, until her death on New Year’s Day 1981. This recording of the most famous and virtuosic of Beethoven’s violin sonatas, the Kreutzer, is a limber, athletic, songful performance of great freshness, as one might expect from teenagers. The Sonata No. 7 is the most darkly intense of the set, with a profound slow movement. By the time the young Menuhins recorded it, in 1938, their duo was well established and there is a palpable feeling of greater assurance in the performance.