Here are the big names of 20th-century American music from an unfamiliar angle, and it’s all wonderfully played. Barber’s early Sonata (1932) was dedicated to his conservative Italian teacher who admired Brahms, and it shows: the work could almost be called Brahms’s Third. This spectacular performance confirms its status as a standard classic, if not as personal as later Barber.

Carter’s Sonata (1948) heralds his demanding later style. It starts with a staccato piano part, which Carter described as ‘like a clock ticking’, and the writing soon gets densely energetic for both players. The second movement, a kind of syncopated scherzo, has vestiges of Carter’s earlier style in pieces like the Holiday Overture. There’s an eloquent slow movement and a hyperactive finale ending with the ticking clock in the cello.

Crumb’s little-known early Sonata for solo cello (1955) has few of the characteristics of the mature composer we hear in such pieces as the Makrokosmos group. Written for his mother, a cellist, it has an attractive second movement in siciliano rhythm and is a fine vehicle for Paul Watkins. The rest of the CD contains arrangements made by the composers. The Bernstein Meditations stem from interludes in his Mass. The second, based on the weird chromatic sequence in the finale of Beethoven’s Choral Symphony, is strikingly intense but the varied metres of the last are familiar, with hymn-like slow passages. Here Huw Watkins uses a bongo instead of hacking his fingers tapping on the piano lid. The two popular numbers from Billy the Kid are inimitable Copland fun. This is a winning collection: excellent recording, magnificent cello, and all we need in Mervyn Cooke’s notes.