Cellists like to get together to form multi-cello ensembles; in making a disc in which he’s the sole performer, Matthew Barley has taken such enthusiasm a step further. His playing and the recording are both excellent, generally giving a very natural-sounding effect. The artificiality of hearing the same performer playing up to eight cellos simultaneously is offset to some extent by the fact that each voice was recorded complete, without edits. Occasionally the absolute unanimity of tone-colour, attack and vibrato sounds slightly ‘unreal’ – at the start of the Stravinsky, for instance – but for most of the time what we hear is a believable illusion (which is all any recording is, in relation to live performance).

My reservations about the CD mainly concern the programme and the arrangements. The one piece expressly composed for multiple cellos, Arvo Pärt’s Fratres, is brilliantly conceived for the medium (though as musical narrative it’s almost entirely lacking in suspense). Barley’s arrangement of Britten’s version of the Corpus Christi Carol (preceded by Judi Dench’s beautiful reading of the text) is equally effective. And the Bach chorales, played as buoyantly as this, could hardly fail to sound well. But in music like the Allegri, stemming so directly from the rhythm and sense of the text, persuasive shaping of the phrases is no substitute for actually hearing the words. Dido’s Lament, in this faithfully transcribed version, loses the contrasting elements of Purcell’s original setting, between recitative (accompanied by basso continuo) and aria (with full strings), between voice and instruments, between the different timbres of violin, viola and bass violin. Despite many fine things, I can only rate the CD as a partial success. But if, for you, the cello ranks above all other instruments, you’ll love it.