Richard Strauss’s youthful Cello Sonata is often described, following Norman Del Mar’s classic study of his music, as influenced by Mendelssohn. There are also touches of Brahms – and of Strauss himself. With hindsight, which is at least insight, the music shows not a few signs of the mature composer’s harmonic colouring, and there is certainly plenty of his energy, sometimes doing duty for real invention. To this, Mischa Maisky and Pavel Gililov wholeheartedly respond, going at the powerful first movement with a panache that makes the most of the best in the music and sails airily through the odd clumsiness. Not even Maisky can do much for the rather flat Andante but he is well at ease with the separately composed Romanze, and with his own arrangement of the song “Morgen”, which does more than simply reiterate the vocal line.

Dvorák’s Sonatina was originally a violin-andpiano piece for two of his children, and though Maisky takes it with a light touch, and despite clear and sympathetic piano accompaniment from Gililov, it does not really go as well on the cello. The last of the Four Romantic Pieces, which began life as a Trio and which Dvorák said he had hugely enjoyed writing, fares better in this arrangement; and the Rondo, in which it sounds as if Dvorák enjoyed himself more and more as it goes on, is charmingly played. An excellent recording deals admirably with the notorious balance problems of cello and piano.