Brahms can be made too burly. But from the young Israeli-Canadian cellist, Ofra Harnoy, he could profitably be burlier. Her tone is beautifully mellow, but in shared climaxes it's not large enough to match up to William Aide's piano—and his more positive commitment. On the rival RCA version from Yo-Yo Ma and Emanuel Ax there are similar problems of balance, but because Ma is a little more radiant and varied in colour, your ear is more easily lured to the cello's song. I sometimes even wondered if Harnoy like Steven Isserlis (Hyperion), was using gut strings. Of these three performances, I think it's the soft-grained but incandescent Isserlis and Peter Evans who achieve the best balance, though I regret the occasional suspicion of metal in the Hyperion keyboard reproduction.
Like her two young rivals, Harnoy prefers to emphasize the poetically introspective rather than the sternly classical Brahms. Despite some prettification (through rubato) of the Allegretto and passing rhythmic instability in the finale, her tempos in the E minor Sonata are more judicious than those of the all-too-leisurely Ma. In the F major Sonata, however, I think she was misguided, in view of her limited strength, to choose so slow a speed for the Adagio. Its plangent opening not only lacks body but also sustained intensity. In several other places in this work I felt she was not yet sufficiently mistress of the broad soaring tune. Her phrasing is a little too shyly short-breathed. In view of such strong competition (not forgetting the older Harrel/Ashkenazy/Decca and Rostropovich/Serkin/DG issues). I think she might have been wiser to wait for a strengthening of her convictions—or ability to project them—before recording these two essentially masculine works. But there's never a moment's doubt as to her sensitive, caring musicianship.'