Tchaikovsky’s Rococo Variations continues to be one of his most popular pieces, beloved of cellists as well as their audiences. Yet, oddly, what Tchaikvosky wrote is very seldom played. It is here. The familiar version, reshuffling the order of the variations, omitting one of them and recomposing various bits, was the work of his cellist friend Wilhelm Fitzenhagen, rather reluctantly issued by his publisher friend Pyotr Jürgenson. Tchaikovsky himself, asked what he felt about the matter, brushed the question impatiently aside with ‘To the devil with it! Let it stand as it is’. All the same, it is good to have the chance of hearing the original (other recordings are by Raphael Wallfisch with Geoffrey Simon, Steven Isserlis with John Eliot Gardiner and Julian Lloyd Webber with Maxim Shostakovich). Miklós Perényi plays with suitably rococo elegance, in a manner closer to chamber music than to a concerto, and the recording responds to this by not setting him too far in front of the excellent Manchester Camerata and keeping their individual contributions clear. The result is an attractive, companionable performance. The slow waltz is gently, even ruminatively played, and the popular D minor variation (one of those that Fitzenhagen shifted to a new position) handled with a light touch and with some nice woodwind comments.

The opening Allegro of Prokofiev’s symphony is taken a little slowly, without loss of charm, whereas the finale turns into a bit of a race for home, if one in which the speeding orchestra acquits itself well. In between, the Larghetto is gracefully done, though the Gavotte sounds more like a rustic Ländler than the courtly dance Prokofiev was emulating.