Guy Johnston’s cello was built in Rome in 1714 by the Bavarian-born David Tecchler. To commemorate its 300th birthday, the 36-year-old English cellist devised an autobiographical programme that traces this particular instrument back to its Roman roots while looking to the future with three specially commissioned works.

Johnston and his two brothers were all choristers at King’s College, Cambridge, and the disc opens with Ola Gjeilo’s Serenity (O magnum mysterium), a pretty, generically reverent piece for cello and choir whose gratingly saccharine New Age tinge is mitigated somewhat by the solo cello’s quietly aching counterpoint. Happily, the three brand-new solo works – all handsomely recorded in Wigmore Hall – are far more substantive and satisfying. David Matthews’s Ein Celloleben imagines the cello as hero (with a wink and nod to Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben) and pays homage to two-and-a-half centuries’ worth of repertoire in just over five minutes, yet retains a stylistic cohesion. Mark Simpson’s Un regalo is less tautly structured but its extreme juxtapositions of register and mood show off both Johnston’s virtuosity and the instrument’s character. Charlotte Bray’s work, inspired by images of a supermassive black hole in the Perseus galaxy, couples an atmosphere of cinematic spaciness with an intensity fuelled by obsessive motivic concision.

Johnston founded the Hatfield House Chamber Music Festival, where this wild-eyed performance of Beethoven’s Ghost Trio was recorded with his violinist brother Magnus and pianist Tom Poster. The overly close miking is claustrophobia-inducing at times but adds to the supernatural quality of Poster’s hyper-articulate playing in the slow movement. In the Barrière duo sonata, Johnston and Sheku Kanneh-Mason revel in the music’s intimate camaraderie.

The programme closes with Respighi’s Adagio with Variations, recorded in Rome. Johnston’s tempo is more andante than adagio, really, giving this elegiac score an unusually restless character. Despite some variability in the recorded sound from work to work, this is an enjoyable excursion and documents Johnston’s versatility.