“Why record these pieces?” asks Megan Sterling, principal flautist at the Hong Kong Philharmonic and Australian pianist Kristian Chong. Their reply is simply that they are among their favourite works for flute and piano, and yet this album is no ragbag of bon-bons. Indeed, it comes across as a thoughtful survey of a century of chamber music and a lively demonstration of how, on occasion, the French approach to the flute has influenced music written in the Antipodes.

It opens with the most familiar music here: Poulenc’s warm-hearted sonata, a work that opens in a mood of Proustian nostalgia and ends in a whirl of Gallic bonhomie. The playing is outstanding (as it is throughout). Chong, a probing, sensitive presence, gives due prominence to the unfolding of Sterling’s lyrical line in the central cantilena before the two players link arms, as it were, in the energetic finale. They are equally compelling in Gaubert’s First Sonata, a piece that really does deserve to be heard more often. The melismatic opening Modéré is a heartbreaker, the closing Allegro moderato