Even many who have never read (or never finished reading) À la Recherche du Temps Perdu, will know a couple of the devices Marcel Proust uses to introduce his idea of involuntary memory – when an everyday experience triggers the effortless recall of events buried in the subconscious. The most famous is the madeleine, the cake dipped in tea whose taste provokes the flood of interwoven memories that the unnamed narrator then takes seven volumes to explore fully, but there is also “la petite phrase”, the little phrase from the slow movement of a violin sonata by the fictional composer Vinteuil, which is first played to Charles Swann by the woman he loves, Odette de Crécy, and which becomes for him a recurrent symbol of their love.

Though various candidates have been suggested, from César Franck’s famous Violin Sonata onwards, the identity of the work that was Proust’s model for the Vinteuil sonata has never been established. Together with one of the less likely choices, Debussy’s Violin Sonata, the Milstein sisters, Maria and Nathalia, play two of the frontrunners in their Proust-themed collection. There’s Saint-Saëns’ Violin Sonata in D minor, from which, Proust admitted in a letter, he had obtained the idea of the “little phrase”, though he was no great admirer of Saint-Saëns, and described the phrase itself as “charming but mediocre”. And there’s also the much less well known violin sonata by Gabriel Pierné, which is the Milsteins’ favourite for the source of the Vinteuil Sonata, identifying a theme in the work’s opening movement as the “little phrase”. Surprisingly, perhaps, another leading candidate, the sonata by Guillaume Lekeu, which was designated by its composer as a work “for piano and violin”, the same unfashionable description that Proust gives the Vinteuil Sonata, is not even mentioned in the otherwise detailed booklet essay, and might have been a more logical piece to include on the disc than the Debussy.

Simply as a disc of French violin sonatas, however, this works very well. The performances of all three, and of the two transcriptions of songs by Reynaldo Hahn, Proust’s first great love and lifelong close friend, which separate them, are supple and quietly effective. The salon-like intimacy of the balance between the violin and the piano is totally appropriate, and the transparent detailing of the textures seems effortless, too. It’s hugely enjoyable, however much you know about Proust.