There’s an autumnal air to the music on this album, and not just because much of it was written in the shadow of the last century’s two world wars. The playing has a serenity and often delicacy, and a pervasive maturity that weaves disparate pieces into an appealing, seamless recital of 20th-century French cello-and-piano works.

Compare Matt Haimovitz’s reading of the Poulenc Sonata with that of the cellist for whom it was written, Pierre Fournier. The older cellist is slightly more bumptious, more forward with his tone, more inclined to accentuate the music’s discontinuity. Haimovitz is smoother, more reticent, almost retiring at times. Pianist Mari Kodama takes the same approach (with gorgeous results in the Cavatine movement), and together the two players yield an achingly melancholy view of one of the great masterpieces of the 20th-century cello repertoire.

In his notes for the recording, Haimovitz tells a harrowing anecdote about his personal relation to the Poulenc. While coaching a student on the piece, he tripped and fell, with disastrous results for his 1710 Matteo Goffriller cello. This recording, made in 2019 before the pandemic began, is the first one on which he has used the restored instrument.

That little story may be irrelevant to the music but it is personal and touching, and that seems to be the larger aim of this album: a gentle but heart-on-sleeve approach to gentle but heart-on-sleeve music. Several of the works included are transcriptions of songs, emphasising the cello’s natural affinity with the human voice. Others, including works by Nadia and Lili Boulanger, are deeply personal and deliciously idiosyncratic, music by composers who had a distinct voice. The autumnal air to the whole recital is a significant achievement, a reminder how the particularly French aesthetic of the works captured here preserves the particular, the individual, the unique impress of distinct minds. Haimovitz and Kodama add their own nuances to this catalogue of sensibility, with deeply satisfying results.