The cynic might surmise that this is the sort of disc that a cellist produces when he has exhausted important cello literature, but it is more than that. Steven Isserlis expounds his reasoning in a booklet-note, and Sally Beamish’s realisation – or re-imagining – of a putative Debussy suite is a delight. This is, in a sense, Debussy before he became Debussy, a sequence of salon pieces composed in advance of his maturity and his espousal of musical Impressionism. Beamish has taken an early Intermezzo and a Scherzo that are known to have been written for cello, and has supplemented them with arrangements for cello and orchestra of a Rêverie and Danse bohémienne, originally for piano solo, and with a transcription of a song that takes the place of a Nocturne that Debussy is presumed to have intended to or, maybe, did write. Beamish’s orchestration, as reproduced by the Tapiola Sinfonietta under Gábor Takács-Nagy, is lucid and deft, and the piece has allure.

Ravel’s Deux Mélodies hébraïques, conceived for soprano, are heard in arrangements for cello and orchestra by Richard Tognetti, and Bloch’s From Jewish Life is given evocative orchestral guise by Christopher Palmer. Prokofiev’s Concertino, Op 132, one of the late works that he left unfinished, is here a hybrid of Rostropovich’s completion and a scoring by Vladimir Blok, with a further change to the end of the first movement. Far limper than the Symphony-Concerto, the Concertino nevertheless exudes, in parts, some of the piquancy of Prokofiev in his prime.