Scary time, the 1930s, when the Stalinist denunciation of Soviet artists made for serious anxiety among composers just waiting for the dreaded knock at the door from the secret police, and some of the justifiable paranoia is manifested in the music itself. Take the searing opening solo melody in Prokofiev’s Second Violin Concerto for instance, with which Dutch star Janine Jansen opens her outstanding new all- Prokofiev disc. It’s a restless, unsettled kind of thing, and that first movement as a whole is a musical cat on a hot tin roof, jumping at its own shadows, and made all the more disconcerting by the intellectual clarity of the performance and the equivalent audio definition in a masterly production job by Decca’s engineers.

Not that it’s all Reds-under-the-bed hysteria. The concerto’s slow movement is a gloriously long-arching melody, even if the mechanical accompaniment provides a menacing, albeit subtle, reminder of the machinery of war parading by outside. Every note here is made to count, and while it never fully engages the emotions, Jansen again demonstrates why her first recording back in 2004 sold 300,000 copies. She is the violinist for the age, detached yet precise, cool but considered, and when she lunges into the considerable technical challenges of the finale there is due diligence paid to the weighting of every demi-semi-quaver.

The Sonata for Two Violins Op 56 (partnering violinist Boris Brovtsyn’s first-ever recording) and the Violin Sonata No 1, Op 80 from the same period are built on similarly spooky, twisted stuff, an excellent coupling demonstrating that Shostakovich hadn’t completely cornered the musical market in 1930s Soviet neurosis.