As debut solo albums go, the Korean cellist Hee-Young Lim’s Abbey Road-recorded programme of French cello concertos – with the LSO under Scott Yoo – is certainly at the upper end of the assuredness spectrum. The programme draws on – and the booklet notes expound upon – Lim’s affinity for French music and culture, grown over years living in Paris. It’s a meaty programme too, which sees her partner the regularly recorded pair of the Saint Saëns and Lalo concertos with the lesser-spotted Milhaud concerto, topped off with two crowd-pleasing ‘bises’ in the form of Offenbach’s Les larmes de Jacqueline and Massenet’s Méditation from Thaïs.

Lim brings an exceptionally refined, silkily lyrical sound to the whole. In fact her very first Saint Saëns entry verily glides in while also still indisputably meeting the score’s marcato markings. Or, for a lovely instance of stylistic finesse dovetailing with a broad tonal spectrum, try her luxuriously taken chromatic climb in the same concerto’s final movement, from richly throbbing bottom C depths up to silvery C⁷ heights (5'06" to 5'31"). She can do edge, too, as heard in the punch of her Milhaud’s strident opening solo before Scott Yoo and the orchestra suavely sashay in underneath. Then, while the Massenet may only be the encore, it’s a very satisfying one: a gentle and sophisticated reading which by turns takes its time and pushes things on in all the right places, supported by a softly glowing orchestra.

Naxos’s booklet notes for Li Wei Qin’s programme of Russian cello concertos with Michael Halász and the Czech Chamber Philharmonic Orchestra, Pardubice, contain fewer clues as to his own inspiration for going Russian, besides perhaps his Silver at the 1998 Tchaikovsky International Competition; and while he conveys a similar lyricism, his playing often has a little less finesse. He’s not helped here by the orchestra itself: take Tchaikovsky’s Variations on a Rococo Theme, where the opening orchestral sighing phrases come with sharp revs in dynamic, weighty pauses and vaguely shrieky woodwind. The glowing tone Qin brings to his own first entry goes some way to making amends for this (and indeed the orchestra has its good moments thereafter), but even from him it’s a bit of a mixed bag as the work progresses. For instance, Variation 4’s neat fluttering scales are slightly undone by a bull-in-a-china-shop approach to Var 5’s virtuoso leaps, which adversely affects tonal production.

Likewise, Tchaikovsky’s Andante cantabile is played with love and with an attractively rich and warm sound, but to my ears Qin has uncomfortably over-delivered on the hairpin covering that string of repeated solo Fs (1'59"). What I did enjoy more was Glazunov’s Concerto ballata, where everyone delivers a fully invested and no-quibbles attractive Russian sound.