If you were to listen to this disc "blind" I don't think you would identify the composer as Italian. The young Ottorino Respighi (1879-1936), a contemporary of Puccini, looked north over the Alps for his musical influences, writing firmly in the Austro-German tradition and with an astonishingly assured Brahmsian sweep. At 19 he was already an accomplished violinist, giving the instrument long, singing lines in his Sonata in D, which Tanja Becker-Bender exploits to the full here. The 1917 B Minor Sonata is an altogether more intense affair, with a complex harmonic structure beautifully delineated by Péter Nagy.