The Greek word ‘afierossis’ is a portmanteau of ‘dedication’ and ‘sacred’. On this impressive recording, the Athens-born cellist Michael Heupel explores both meanings in a range of 20th- and 21st-century works for solo cello where personal attribution and memorialisation lie at the music’s very core.

With its brooding lower register and lyrical high range, the cello lends itself particularly well to epigrammatic works of unsettling intensity, such as György Kurtág’s characteristically concise brace of miniatures, In memoriam György Aczél and Pilinszky János: Gérard de Nerval, or Krzysztof Penderecki’s Per Slava. Heupel’s interpretation of the latter is especially convincing, laying bare the music’s fissured surfaces while maintaining its overall formal shape.

Heupel explores a wider timbral palette in Bertold Hummel’s Fantasia II, ‘in memoriam Pablo Casals’, which makes judicious use of harmonics and muted sounds. He also manages to capture the terse, dialogic interplay underpinning both movements of György Ligeti’s Solo Cello Sonata – reserved in the first, erupting into life in the second – although the latter’s capriccio is perhaps not as carefully managed as Matt Haimovitz’s excellent performance on ‘Orbit: Music for Solo Cello’ (Pentatone).

Lighter contrasts are occasionally heard here, such as in Miklós Rózsa’s dancelike Toccata capricciosa and in the third and fourth movements of Efi Markoulaki’s Cretan Suite, especially composed for Heupel in 2016. However, the most memorable moments remain profoundly introspective, as typified in Aulis Sallinen’s unsettling Elegie Sebastian Knight’ille and Walton’s late Passacaglia for solo cello, both of which lend themselves to the dark, resonant hues of Heupel’s low range and soaring treble lines.