If ever you needed proof of how utterly tone-deaf were the Soviet Union’s post-war denunciations of musical ‘formalism’, you couldn’t do much better than Nikolay Myaskovsky’s Second Cello Sonata: a work composed in 1948 but marginally less challenging, both stylistically and in emotional range, than his First, written in 1911. And it’s none the worse for it. This is merely by way of saying that while Myaskovsky’s music certainly can be bold, uninhibited and outspoken, his cello sonatas don’t spring many surprises.

Still, for much of the time Pavel Gomziakov and the pianist Andrei Korobeinikov positively wallow in them. Gomziakov can certainly spin a lyrical line, and the tone of his C string is a thing of bottomless, velvet-black depth, booming sonorously out over the slightly brittle sound of Korobeinikov’s piano. Climaxes are huge, thunderous cloudbursts; and the massive opening chord of Prokofiev’s Ballade (1912), coming after the subdued ending of Myaskovsky’s First Sonata, is practically apocalyptic. But there’s a downside to all this grandeur and, quite apart from the fact that an over-resonant acoustic muddles a lot of the busier music, Gomziakov’s sound in the upper registers is relatively constricted.

That actually helps clarify matters in the more lightly written Second Sonata (it was originally conceived for viola d’amore), but clarity doesn’t bring any greater sense of urgency. While it never sounds less than pleasant, it’s all rather discursive: you miss Laura van der Heijden’s sense of direction, of phrases being shaped to a purpose. Even the finale, which Gomziakov and Korobeinikov take at a dashing pace, is slightly smudged. Taneyev’s Canzona – unconvincingly transcribed from a clarinet piece – is nice to have; but really, this is a disc for Myaskovsky completists.