Anne-Sophie Mutter was not quite 20 when she recorded Brahms’s Double Concerto with cellist Antonio Meneses, Herbert von Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic – a big, burly account plagued by early digital sound that’s quite unflattering to all. For this new recording, made in Prague in early 2022, she teamed up with the Spanish cellist Pablo Ferrández (for whom Mutter has served as a mentor), Manfred Honeck and the Czech Philharmonic.

Honeck’s Brahms is also big and bold, though more streamlined and finely detailed than Karajan’s, while Ferrández projects a more forceful personality than did his predecessor. And although both soloists are rather closely miked, the sound on the new Sony recording provides relatively pleasant listening. Ferrández’s tone is warmly expressive and enhanced by the generous application of portamento, as in the opening movement’s second theme at 6'26", yet in his communicative zeal he can sometimes seem a bit coarse – the ugly (unmarked) accent on fourth note of his opening cadenza, say, or at 4'03" in the finale.

As for Mutter, she sounds far more refined here than she did 40 years ago, although her vibrato does feel a bit too wide for me on occasion. On the other hand, she and Ferrández are very much in sync, and there are some truly exquisite passages – their oh-so-tender triplets in the slow movement at 2'31", say – with Honeck and the Czech orchestra providing beautifully burnished support throughout. I still far prefer Antje Weithaas and Maximilian Hornung with the NDR Radiophilharmonie under Andrew Manze, not least because they follow Brahms’s score more faithfully (Ferrández, for example, ignores Brahms’s instruction to play the opening cadenza ‘always in tempo’).

I’m considerably more impressed by the performance (with Mutter’s trusted pianist Lambert Orkis) of Clara Schumann’s Piano Trio. Perhaps the tempo for the opening movement is more allegro agitato than Allegro moderato (as written), but the musicians’ sense of the music’s ebb and flow feels utterly natural and right. There’s marvellous delicacy, too – try at 5'29" in that first movement or at any point in the Scherzo – along with a near-ideal balance of charm and dramatic concision. Overall, this new recording is more interpretatively daring than the Nash Ensemble’s superbly polished version – indeed, I’d have a very difficult time choosing between the two.