Although memorably heartfelt and at times heroic, Felix Mendelssohn’s immensely likeable First Cello Sonata is hardly on a par with the sonatas of Beethoven or Brahms, whereas the Second Sonata is a work that counts among the glories of the instrument’s repertoire, its impassioned first page calling to mind the composer’s Italian Symphony and String Quartet Op 80. When Sol Gabetta and Bertrand Chamayou performed chamber music for the first time together, this elevated sonata was on their programme, ‘and although we’ve now been performing together for 17 or 18 years’, she tells us as part of this release’s booklet annotation, ‘the present Mendelssohn recording is what we have both always wanted to make’.

They certainly do the piece proud, especially the joyful opening where both players lunge at the notes like demons possessed. The slow movement opens to widely spaced arpeggiated chords which Chamayou takes fairly briskly (compare the relative breadth of Franz Rupp for Emanuel Feuermann or György Sebők for János Starker), an approach that suits their impetuous approach. Either way works well, especially in the case of Feuermann’s classically poised and tonally ravishing performance, which remained in Victor’s vaults unissued for many years. It has to be heard for sure, but Gabetta and Chamayou are deeply involving in a quite different way, and their brilliant account of the finale balances the first movement to perfection.

The Variations concertantes were inspired by Mendelssohn’s younger brother Paul, a cellist himself, and parade a variety of colours, textures and tempos, aspects of the music that Gabetta and Chamayou respond to with alertness and an appreciation of its lyrical character. The comparatively rare Assai tranquillo and the Op 109 Song without Words (a term coined by Fanny Mendelssohn) are also sensitively turned.

In the works by Mendelssohn, Chamayou uses a Blüthner piano dating from around 1859 and Sol Gabetta the Bonamy Dobrée-Suggia cello that was made by Stradivari in 1717. She uses gut-core strings wound with steel, whereas for the modern works she opts for an instrument made by Matteo Gofriller in Venice in 1730, and Chamayou switches to a modern Steinway. I applaud these choices, especially as Sony’s sound production (many thanks Michael Brüggemann and Joel Cormier) captures their relative virtues in the warm, sympathetic acoustic of the Philharmonie de Paris.

The fascinating 20th-century makeweights bring the journey more or less up to date with Jörg Widmann’s Song without Words (a ‘homage and a tribute to Mendelssohn as the master of this form’, as the composer puts it) and Francisco Coll’s Dialogue without Words, both works treading a modernised lyrical path, where Mendelssohn’s muse seems like a distant echo. Two pieces by Wolfgang Rihm – Song without Words and Verschwundene Worte (‘Vanished Words’) – inhabit autumnal vistas whereas a sequence of three Songs without Words by Heinz Holliger calls on just about every trick in the cellists’ book in pursuit of maximum expressive variety, not least harmonics, slow slides, pizzicatos and so forth. Bertrand Chamayou on the other hand makes hay with Holliger’s near-on orchestral piano-writing (try the thunderous whale-song that opens the last of them). Add excellent annotations by Alexander Gurdon (to which I am personally indebted) and we’re privileged with a fine tribute not only to Mendelssohn and those inspired by his example, but to two exceptional players on top form.