C 711 081 BAs was to be expected, the programme was extremely virtuosic, but it also placed the most varied stylistic demands on both its performers, encompassing, as it did, three centuries of music, beginning with Bach's Partita no. 1 for unaccompanied violin and taking in the Sonata in G by the German-born Israeli composer Paul Ben-Haim (1897-1984), a piece that represents a fascinating attempt to create a formal, harmonic and melodic synthesis of Western and Middle Eastern musical traditions. Francescatti plays both these unaccompanied works with the same floating, silky tone, while revealing extreme flexibility in terms of dynamics and agogic accents. His outstanding gifts as a chamber musician with a true command of the give and take necessary in such music are revealed in his performance of Brahms's Violin Sonata op. 108 in which he is ably partnered by Eugenio Bagnoli, while in two brilliant salon pieces, Saint-Saëns's Introduction et Rondo capriccioso and Ravel's Tzigane, he deploys all the refinement and technical panache expected of him. It is no accident that his name is often associated with that of Nicolò Paganini, for he could trace back his musical pedigree to the "Devil's violinist" through his father and the latter's teacher. Two encores rounded off the evening, Francescatti's own arrangement for piano and violin of Chopin's Mazurka op. 68 no. 4 and Pablo de Sarasate's Zapatera. Based on a tape in the Salzburg Festival's archives, the present recording provides us with an impressive cross-section of the wide-ranging repertory of his important violinist.