Weill’s Cello Sonata (1920) is an early work, so one will look largely in vain for the easy melodism of the Broadway musicals or the biting satire of his Brecht collaborations. The large opening movement stretched his technical and structural abilities to the limit and is not wholly successful. The central Andante espressivo is more controlled but only in the finale does the work take wing. There is little here to object to beside a generally histrionic manner.

Toch’s Sonata (1929), by comparison, is the product of a mature composer and entirely successful on its own terms. A compact work written for Emanuel Feuermann, its broadly Hindemithian style would doubtless have caused the composer trouble with the Nazi regime had his Jewishness not already landed him in hot water as it was. It is a vibrant and engrossing work, not least for its central contrapuntal span, appropriately titled ‘The Spider’. Its rediscovery here is thoroughly welcome.

Hindemith’s ‘Aryan’ credentials were impeccable and it really was his music, particularly of his racier operas (Murder, Hope of Women, Sancta Susanna, News of the Day), against which the Nazi leadership fulminated. Yet his 1919 Sonata is by far the most subversive (albeit not politically) music here but, unlike the couplings, hardly a ‘rediscovered masterpiece’, since there have been over a dozen recordings of it, half of them currently available on CD.

These new performances are very robust, which may not suit all tastes. In the Weill, Centaur’s sound scores over Berlin Classics (as it does in the Hindemith over Wergo), but I would not rate this newcomer necessarily as preferable. In the Hindemith, competition is stiffer. Next to Martin Ostertag (on MDG) and Wendy Warner (on Bridge), Arthur Cook sounds heavy-handed and over-emphatic. Warner is still the first choice, rightly making the sonata more mercurial and subtle, as comparisons of the opening and closing passages alone will show, although this holds good throughout. Nonetheless, the present disc is a useful addition to the catalogue.