Listening to Kian Soltani performing Dvořák’s Cello Concerto with Daniel Barenboim and the Staatskapelle Berlin, the slightly old-fashioned word that kept finding its way into my notes was ‘nobility’. To those who’ve been following Barenboim’s Berlin Elgar recordings, that probably won’t come as too much of a surprise; and it almost goes without saying that the orchestral playing on this recording is silken, translucent and lit with an inner glow.

Barenboim moves broadly and with deliberation, using his orchestra’s full operatic palette: by the end of the slow movement we could almost be in Siegfried’s forest. Soltani fills gracefully shaped phrases with eloquent, butterscotch-tinted cello sound. He crafts a lucid, clearly defined and distinctly classical reading, not without humour (the opening theme of the finale almost seems to skip).

But nobility also implies restraint; we’re a long way here from the body-and-soul emotional commitment of (say) Karajan and Rostropovich. Both Barenboim and Soltani husband their reserves of expression, though when they do cut loose – for instance, when the second subject returns in majesty near the end of the first movement – they go straight for the heart. A more serious reservation concerns the woodwind-playing. It’s ravishing, of course, but I never quite felt that Barenboim lets his players off the leash to create the moments of chamber-music intimacy – of tender, playful conversation with the soloist – that are such an enchanting feature of this concerto.

Still, that might be a price worth paying for the overall grandeur, the tonal beauty and – again – nobility of this performance. Soltani and the cellos of the Staatskapelle do, for what it’s worth, find some real intimacy in the five gorgeously played encores for cello ensemble that close the disc; and if this is your sort of thing, you won’t hear it done better.