In 1984 Steven Isserlis made excellent recordings for Hyperion of the Brahms sonatas with Peter Evans (4/86 – nla); this time he’s added some substantial extra items – the two Suk pieces, wonderfully played, are particularly welcome. The new recording is fuller in sound and more realistic; Stephen Hough’s commanding playing of Brahms’s ‘big’ piano parts could, one feels, overpower the cello but, thanks to his sensitivity, this never happens.

In the sonatas, the timings are in nearly every case slightly shorter, due not to any very different tempi but because the music now flows more easily, with less sense of effort. Some listeners may miss the intensity of Evans’s involvement with the music but the new versions have a wonderful sense of line, and Hough’s more detached approach comes with vivid characterisation – seen in the sinister colours of No 2’s Allegro passionato, for example, or the limpid, elegant playing of No 1’s Allegretto quasi menuetto.

Only in one place, the finale of No 2, did I feel that Hough’s fluency creates a problem: repeating the opening theme, he pushes on in a way that detracts from the sunny, contented atmosphere at the start. There are a few places, too, where Isserlis misses the sense of grandeur that Anne Gastinel, for example, can bring to Brahms’s cello writing – No 2’s Adagio provides an instance, where Isserlis opts instead for a warm, intimate tone. Overall, these are deeply considered, immensely satisfying accounts. Isserlis and Hough make a formidable team and I look forward to more duo sonatas.