“I like nothing better than chamber music,” Saint-Saëns once wrote to a violinist friend and, indeed, he did much to promote the genre in Paris during the second half of the 19th century. Prominent among his works for violin and piano is the technically challenging 1885 Violin Sonata No. 1 which balances passion with clarity. The Triptyque of 1912 shows his mastery of melody, rhythm and metre, and elsewhere in this first volume one finds numerous examples of his instinct for charm and characterisation.