This second volume of Ferdinand Ries’s violin sonatas furthers our exploration of music by a gifted composer who enjoyed a close and productive relationship with Beethoven as student, friend, and colleague. Filled with elegance and refinement, these three sonatas display the range of Ries’s creative gifts as a composer, skilfully synthesising the clarity and discipline of Mozart’s Viennese Classical style with the inventiveness and freedom of the new Romanticism developing in the early 19th century. Volume 1 (8.573193) was regarded as ‘simply too good to miss’ by MusicWeb International.