Well, what a find – or set of finds, I should say. This fascinating programme, recorded in a warm church acoustic, is the result of former Rostropovich pupil Julius Berger’s fascination with Max Reger’s three Cello Suites and Kodály’s Solo Cello Sonata, both written in 1915 and drawing on the Cello Suites of JS Bach. At the time, Pablo Casals was championing the Bach Suites, performing them as solo works rather than accompanied, as had been the 19th-century approach. Wondering whether the Reger and Kodály had really been that period’s only solo-Bach-inspired cello offerings, Berger went digging and uncovered these four compositions by British musicologist and musical analyst Donald Tovey, German violinist Adolf Busch and Swiss composer Walter Courvoisier – which now he has recorded on Baroque-style gut strings and lower 432Hz tuning. They chime beautifully among themselves, because not only do they all clearly reference the Bach original in their thematic material and its treatment but they’re also all cast in an essentially tonal but harmonically liberated language.

Busch fans will be especially interested in the four-movement Cello Suite and D minor Prelude and Fugue that he composed in 1914 for his cellist brother Hermann, the Fugue initially Bach-breathed, only to then take a hard swerve left down some counter-intuitive alley. Or if it’s introspective poetry you’re after, Courvoisier’s seven-part Suite No 2 in B minor from 1921 fits the bill.

Perhaps the most intriguing listen is Tovey’s substantial Passacaglia, lifted from his longer Sonata for Solo Cello in D, Op 30. Written as early as 1910 and built on an eight-bar ostinato figure, this must surely have been conceived with the great D minor violin Chaconne in mind, and while it’s not in the same league as either the Kodály Sonata or the Reger suites, its passage from subdued sobriety to prouder virtuosity is still ear-grabbing enough to constitute a slap on the wrists to anyone whose student memories of Tovey’s Essays in Musical Analysis had them anticipating something less than scintillating (ahem).

The album’s highlight is that Berger prefaces all the above with a quietly powerful reading of Reger’s melancholic Suite in D minor, drawing on the Bach chorale Wenn ich einmal soll scheiden (‘Be near me, Lord, when dying’), and sounding wonderful via his velvety, focused sound. In fact, if this attractive, atmosphere-laden programme were a colour, it would be a dark one. Also one with tremendous warmth. So while I wouldn’t like to say whether the Busch, Tovey or Courvoisier will henceforth be taken up more widely, in terms of creating an attractive programme worth immersing oneself in, they’ve certainly hit the mark.