Like so many of his string quartets, Shostakovich’s Viola Sonata lends itself ready to orchestral transcription, in the process gaining colour at the expense of intimacy. Romanian viola player/composer Vladimir Mendelssohn brought no little skill to the task in 1991, adding some imaginative and strategically deployed touches, such as the spooky harp and sul ponticello writing in the first movement reprise and effective balalaika imitations in the second. His transcription has already appeared on DG (though details such as the harp in the first movement do not feature there); Gilad Karni is an equally adept soloist, a mite less self-conscious and certainly no less compelling than Bashmet.

Whether Gideon Lewensohn’s ViolAlive (2005) is preferable as a coupling to the orchestration of Shostakovich’s Violin Sonata on the Kremerata Baltica disc may depend on your taste for emotionally upfront, allusion-driven theatricality of a very spaced-out kind. The central conceit of Lewensohn’s 13 movements, of “an ongoing search for theatrical aspects of musical ideas and gestures”, is all well and good.

The trouble is that his musical invention is flaccid by comparison with, say, that of Schnittke’s Viola Concerto or Kancheli’s Styx, with whose idiom and aesthetic it significantly overlaps. Even when the piece occasionally shakes off its lethargy, the flame of inspiration burns only fitfully, and without the visual aspect of the soloist’s wanderings between groups of instrument, the impression is of self-absorption rather than anything particularly theatrical or characterful. A pity this, because Sony’s recording is of demonstration quality.