As a felicitous appendix to the compendious boxes from DG and Warner (5/17), this Testament release of Rostropovich in his debut at the Aldeburgh Festival catches the cellist somewhere near his early and all-conquering best. He had never before played the Arpeggione Sonata; in retrospect, his professed nervousness is evident in some snatched bowing and occasionally plain responses to Britten’s nuances of touch and articulation. On the other hand, there is a simple, heartfelt beauty, like a love letter written in a foreign language, to the Adagio which some listeners (including Tully Potter, who contributes the booklet note) have found absent from the more leisurely 1968 Decca recording.

Rostropovich and Britten also reprised the Schumann and Debussy items in the studio (1/62). The concert setting brought predictable losses of momentary coordination offset by palpable gains: a burning eloquence from Rostropovich in the slower middle movements of the Schumann; an even more puckish wit and irreproducible rubato in the Debussy.

The cellist had evidently devoted more of his exiguous rehearsal time to the composer’s new Cello Sonata. Composed quickly in the wake of Britten’s first meeting with both him and Shostakovich in London, the piece sounds more Russian than ever in this, its first performance, from the fearful, muttered opening Dialogue to the fiercely satirical March, which sounds even more like Prokofiev in the first of the recital’s encores.

The second of them brings the single new item to Rostropovich’s discography, an extended Bach aria with Pears on lugubrious form. Happily the album concludes with more Bach from the cellist’s true festival debut four days earlier. In Aldeburgh Parish Church he took a less stately, more relaxed approach to the dances of the C major Suite than in his appearance at the 1955 Prague Spring Festival (Supraphon, A/11) with a gentle and sprightly Bourrée and a bracing, almost garrulous virility to the concluding Gigue. Despite the claim to the contrary in the booklet note, the Suite ends with warm applause. ‘I hef been so happy in Aldeburgh that I don’t want to go’, says Rostropovich in his broken English at the end of the main recital, and it’s clear the feeling was mutual.