This is the second Naxos disc that celebrates the 100th anniversary of the birth in Hungary of Miklos Rozsa. Now more popularly remembered as a composer of many film scores, his musical life started at the age of seven as a prodigy composer and violinist, his mature studies as a composer having taken place in Leipzig. It was a visit to London where he met the film producer Alexander Korda that sparked an interest in work for the cinema. He left with Korda at the outset of the Second World War to seek refuge in Hollywood and settled in the United States for the remainder of his life. His contract with MGM film studio stipulated a three month break in each year so that he could concentrate on his ‘serious’ composing, but the works on this disc come at each end of that part of his career. As a young man he had heard people working in his village and singing folk songs, and it was on those that he based his North Hungarian Peasant Songs and Dances completed in 1929. Cast in four contrasting movements, they are absolutely charming, their neglect all the more strange when you hear this superb performance. Written at much the same time, the Duo contains a degree of folk influences, but whereas the Songs and Dances are a tightly structured work, this one does have a tendency to lose shape. He had turned his back on Hollywood by the time he set to work on the Sonata, though by now he had a degenerative illness. It did not dull his musical ideas, the Sonata, shaped in a three movements, not a showpiece in the accepted sense but a score that demands a player with a remarkable technique. We could safely describe the Russian-born Philippe Quint as a complete violinist, his innate musicianship matched by a technique of supreme accomplishment. In the 1723 ‘Ex-Kiesewetter’ Stradivari he has the magnificent instrument his playing so richly deserves. William Wolfram is much on the Hungarian wavelength and the sound engineers have performed their function with distinction. Fervently recommended.