The present two artists are certainly doing their bit in enlarging the recorded repertoire of the cello. After their highly praised disc of Godard and Boellmann (Hyperion, 9/96) they have turned their attention to two near-contemporaries born in the 1860s, both pupils of Massenet: Pierne famous for succeeding Cesar Franck at the organ of Ste Clotilde and for directing the Orchestre Colonne for many years (and conducting the premiere of Stravinsky’s Firebird), Koechlin (who incidentally taught Cole Porter) for his vast output and his belated crush (in his late sixties) on film stars, particularly Lilian Harvey. The latter composer is represented by two attractive works – a set of Breton folk-song arrangements, which range from the simple and melancholy (“La prophetie”) to the capricious (“Alain-le-Renard”) or the archaic (“Les trois moines rouges”, treated in organum), and which allow Lidstrom to display his tonal range from robust (“Le vin des Gaulois”) to a thread of sound (“Le seigneur Nann et la fee”), and a short sonata from over a decade earlier, written in 1917. Despite being written in wartime, for much of the work the prevailing mood is one of contemplative tranquillity (which calls forth some ravishing soft playing from the cellist), though the central movement has an extremely complex piano part in a free atonality that continues into the agitated finale. Pierne’s big sonata is a rhapsodic, largely ecstatic work in one continuous movement that nevertheless divides into four sections, the material of the long slow first returning after a yearningly sensual Animez: the sonata culminates in an imaginative finale with moments of brilliance. The performance here is an eloquent one by both players, who are to be congratulated on their very sensitive subtlety; and the recording is strikingly truthful.'