Saint-Saëns’s Second Cello Sonata is an extraordinary combination of Baroque rhetoric and high Romanticism, written, not without struggle, in 1905. Formally and musically, he thwarts our expectations at every turn, be it in the edgily rhetorical Maestoso, largamente or the scherzo-with-variations second movement. At its heart lies Bach (the very opening has the air of an updated Solo Cello Suite before yielding to a theme of the kind of limpid simplicity that only JSB could create). Jamie Walton is alive to the twists and turns of Saint-Saëns’s imagination and brings to the sonata a warm, rich sound that is initially very persuasive, ably supported by Daniel Grimwood, who surmounts the considerable challenges of the piano-writing with ease and musicality. But there is more to be wrung from this piece in terms of colour, as Steven Isserlis and Pascal Devoyon so compellingly demonstrate in their RCA reading.

For success in Chopin’s Cello Sonata you need not only a first-rate cellist but, perhaps even more crucially, a pianist utterly at one with his idiom. The mazurka-infused Scherzo is a good litmus test, demanding that the pianist switches from the forthright to the ethereal while negotiating handfuls of notes at speed. So while Pierre Fournier is compelling in his own right, his pianist Jean Fonda is too backwardly miked and not quite dextrous enough. Grimwood is an altogether more convincing foil for Walton; but then you turn to Argerich with Rostropovich and all comparisons are blown out of the water. Her version with Maisky, on the other hand, pushes things too far, losing sight of Chopin’s innate classicism in the process. That balance is better achieved in the Gerhardt/Osborne reading and indeed on this new recording. But again it’s colour that seems in slightly short supply here, with Walton relying perhaps too much on the inherently beautiful sound he makes, which sometimes softens the effect of some of Chopin’s more startling harmonic twists. And in the delightfully frothy Introduction and Polonaise, though Walton and Grimwood are unfailingly musical, they don’t electrify in the manner of Rostropovich and Argerich.