Brilliant and personal exploration of a violinist’s cultural heritage…Jennifer Pike has a bloodline to this repertoire via her Polish mother but hasn’t simply rested on genealogy, absorbing Polish culture and travelling to the Tatra mountains for this disc. Her affinity with Polish expressionistic melancholy is evidenced by deep, personal playing at low registers and a striking harbouring of the sort of ecstatic rapture Szymanowski brings to the high ones. Pike’s engagement with his scented world is made more of rapt rather than neurotic intensity, with touches of fragility, idiosyncratic little glissandos and some exceptional instances of focus. There is every challenge in the book…but in none of those technical challenges does Pike sound anything other than lost in the music.