Last year’s album of Rachmaninov and Barber sonatas from Sheku and Isata Kanneh-Mason (‘Muse’ – 11/21) included a selection of gorgeously played song transcriptions. Here is a whole disc of them.

The album, notable for the variety of its recording locations (the six sessions took place between October last year and April 2022), mixes the new and old, embraces a whole range of musical styles and features a number of the cellist’s own increasingly accomplished arrangements. Its theme may be ‘song’ but the overriding impression is of one of those cassette compilations some of us used to put together to impress (or put off!) a new partner – a bran tub of unrelated pieces that unconsciously revealed a lot about the character of the donor. And the dominant character of the donor is the Sheku that looks out at you from the pages of the booklet: sombre, soulful and introspective.

He opens with the solo cello playing a sombre, soulful, introspective version of ‘Star of the County Down’. But the folk song is a high-spirited appreciation of a young Irish lass who ‘looked so sweet from her two bare feet / To the sheen of her nut-brown hair’. It’s not a lament. For that, Kanneh-Mason might have turned to something like ‘She is far from the land’. Joseph Parry’s ‘Myfanwy’, chosen as a tribute to the cellist’s Welsh grandmother, is given the same treatment. It’s a grand old male voice choir heart-wrencher but loses its impact when every bar of the performance is insistently telling us how heart-wrenching it is. What else wasn’t I taken with? The soprano in the original (but rarely heard) vocal version of Massenet’s famous ‘Élégie’. With a wide vibrato, is it me, or does she tend to be under the note?

The rest of the programme is a succession of pieces that show how a great artist can truly make the cello sing. The highlights for this listener are Kanneh-Mason’s arrangements for five and four cellists respectively of Bach’s Come, Sweet Death and Come Saviour of the Nations, Come, and of Burt Bacharach’s ‘I say a little prayer’ for solo cello (played as an encore after his 2021 Proms appearance); the clever duet arrangement by Simon Parkin of Hollaender’s ‘Falling in love again’; ‘Same Boat’, a pop song co-written with singer-songwriter Zak Abel (might there be more from this partnership in the future?); and sister Isata. What a superb pianist and recital partner she is, sophisticated and understated in Stravinsky’s ‘Chanson russe’ and a delightful Papagena to Sheku’s Papageno in Beethoven’s Magic Flute Variations. This is played with the same kind of perky capriciousness that Emanuel Feuermann and Franz Rupp brought to it in 1939 but played here with far greater warmth and affection.

I love listening to this young musician (he’s still only 23), and I admire his uninhibited and imaginative choice of repertoire and his emotional engagement with what he plays. His song of love to the cello certainly merits a gold star, if not quite ten out of ten.