Rather aptly, Gramophone’s 2021 Concept Album Award-winner Christian-Pierre La Marca has not only gone conceptual again for his second album for Naïve, but produced a generous double-CD ecology-themed offering that sounds less like a classical album than a multi-genre stage production. In fact, given how softly romantic and often wistful the overall tone is, it feels very much like late night in a cabaret club.

Using his cello as the album’s central point, symbolising our world, La Marca has divided his programme into individually titled subsections (‘Pollution, Cities and Waste’, ‘Awareness and Ecological Conversion’, etc) and enlisted the help of a host of top-drawer guest collaborators, then served up everything from Tchaikovsky through to Mancini and Einaudi, constantly switching hats between lead voice and accompanist. Strauss’s ‘Morgen!’ is captivating for the new colours lent via the solo violin lines’ transfer to La Marca’s mellow-voiced cello; and the sensitive lyricism with which he lovingly wraps his upper-register lines around Sabine Devieilhe’s own languorous, silvery-toned reading, the two of them attentively supported by Nathanaël Gouin on piano, is actually exquisite. From there it’s a suave segue into regaining the melodic line for his own and pianist Thomas Enhco’s sultrily wistful arrangement of Weill’s ‘Lost in the stars’.

La Marca clearly relishes his supporting roles, too. Listen to his beguilingly shaped pizzicato accompaniment to ‘You want my money’ with French pop folk duo Lilly Wood & The Prick, then later the way he gently rocks his arco countermelody; and while it’s a bit of a novelty to have ‘You want my money, you wanna strip me butt-naked’ crooning forth from my stereo in the line of Gramophone duty, variations on that theme will undoubtedly be being sung tonight on opera stages around the world.

Much of the more obviously classical fare continues the smooth-listening theme, and the inbuilt romance of miniatures such as Faure’s ‘Après un rêve’ and Saint-Saëns’s ‘The Swan’ – warmly accompanied by musicians from the Orchestre de Paris, although I’m yet to feel that those two are improved by ditching piano for orchestra – has been significantly upped by La Marca’s generous employment of portamento. There are a few palate-cleansers, though. Take his elegantly fiery dispatch of the first movement of Fazıl Say’s Four Cities cello sonata, with its angrily racing double stopped passagework and jagged lines. Also the ear-pricking, birdcall-reminiscent extended techniques of his ‘Between Man and Nature’ improvisation with Thierry Escaich on piano and soprano Patricia Petibon.

A classy and eminently creative offering that should appeal to those in the market for smooth, genre-straddling late-night listening.