Jonah Kim has taken Approaching Autumn, the title of Mark Abel’s new work for cello and piano, as the title of this recital album as a whole. I hadn’t necessarily thought of the Grieg and Kodály sonatas as being especially autumnal but Kim somehow makes the appellation seem apt. First, there’s the cellist’s tone, which has the cosy warmth of a well-loved cashmere sweater. And then there’s his penchant for broad tempos that allow him room for his sound to envelop you.

Kim can be incisive and dramatic, mind you, as he is in the opening movement of Kodály’s epic Solo Sonata, and he’s capable of some ferocious playing, as at 4'38" in the slow movement, where he takes the composer’s feroce marking to heart (I only wish he were as scrupulous with the dynamic markings). More often than not, however, he takes his time. In the feral finale, certainly, I want to feel the cellist is living on the edge, and while Kim does make some wild sounds – the arpeggiated passage near the end, for instance, where he has his instrument making wonderfully weird birdlike calls – I sorely miss the fearlessness of Starker (also on Delos, 1/89) and, more recently, Julian Steckel (AVI Music, 11/19).

In the Grieg, too, he and pianist Robert Koenig provide more lyrical effusion than exhilaration. Tempos far below the printed metronome markings can turn laborious – listen, say, in the first movement around 4'00". There are many really lovely moments, too – I love the crystalline purity they bring to the tranquillo passage in the finale at 1'58", for example – but in general the music needs the kind of urgency Isserlis and Hough bring to it (Hyperion, 7/15).

Abel’s piece is rather curious in that its ‘easy-listening’, pop-inflected surface proves increasingly illusory. The melodic writing is conversational – volubly so – and communicates an unsettling sense of anxiety. There are cadences of Janáček-like brusqueness (at 1'30") and moments of naive nostalgia (3'33") that lead to an unexpectedly dark ending. Kim and Koenig somehow capture the very elusiveness that gives the music its substance.