Playing of such consummate ease combined with involvement and attention to detail...Simply, this is one of the finest, most musically sensitive recordings to have come my way for some time, and the neat title title ‘Deux’ exactly encapsulates the partnership on display. ... When the recording finished I listened to it all over again – it really is that good.

Brimming with personality, individuality and panache; in fact sometimes so much personality that a quick glance at the score is in order, simply to establish exactly what the ratio of Kopatchinskaja versus composer-in-question actually is...Every reading here works like a dream; no doubt in part because the three main works’ Hungarian folk roots are a perfect partner to her own Moldovan folk heritage.

A feast of edgy, risk-filled music-making...this is playing that looks around the corners of the music and is open to what’s coming next...Bartók’s 1922 Sonata No 2 bristles with energy but also glows with mercurially changing colour.

Kopatchinskaja is famous for digging into the strings of her instrument like an old-time prospector desperate for gold. She always finds it too, especially in a repertoire where her Middle European folk roots are a real asset. Hungarian and gypsy rhythms haunt Bartók’s mercurial Violin Sonata No 2, here dazzlingly varied in tone colours, although the music-making’s more striking still in Ravel’s Tzigane. This is dispatched with such furious pluckings, squeakings and slitherings that at the end her bow must have been nothing but wisps and tatters. Leschenko is equally fearsome, rippling through notes with dexterous speed.

Tzigane is off -the-scale exciting and improvisatory, Kop conjuring a scarcely unbelievable range of sounds in the opening solo with the freedom and timbral range of an experimental folk musician plus all the technique of a classical virtuoso.