Leonard Elschenbroich continues his exploration of less ubiquitous Soviet fare with this fine album dedicated to a creative voice he describes as picking up where Shostakovich left off. Schnittke’s cinematic, German-Russian-Jewish polystylism can be droll, caustic or calamitous, with the ‘meaning’ of his scores more than usually dependent on the sensibility and conviction of the executant.

The easiest music here is the Suite in the Old Style, a byproduct of collaborations with film director Elem Klimov on the comedy drama Adventures of a Dentist and the spoof documentary Sport, Sport, Sport. An apparently innocent collage of genre pieces, it was originally conceived (like the infinitely darker, sparer, unaccompanied Madrigal in memoriam Oleg Kagan) with violin rather than cello taking the lead. Stylistically the scores would appear to have little in common. Both are played straight.

The biggest piece is the First Cello Sonata, presented in 1978 to Natalia Gutman and once reckoned the most frequently performed and recorded of all Schnittke’s works. Typically it does not offer resolution, running down from the archetypal building blocks of its opening Largo towards an unsettling, washed-out kind of neutrality. Set against Raphael Wallfisch and John York, Elschenbroich and Petr Limonov plot a daringly extreme course, their first movement more tautly conceived, the central scherzo a positive whirlwind. The finale goes to the other extreme, its disconsolate recall of past gestures spun out to epic proportions. Alban Gerhardt and Steven Osborne on Hyperion are less easily outshone but this massive ‘Russian’ approach suits the music.

Whatever you make of the Shards of Alfred Schnittke, conceived by Elschenbroich himself as ‘a sort of composed interpretation’ marking the 10th anniversary of the master’s death, his playing is both forceful and refined, the sound beautifully focused. His written note is helpful too. Here is one cellist with a horror of cluttering up the world with unnecessary re-recordings of the music everyone knows. Should you be anxious about following him into pastures new, try sampling the title-track, Musica nostalgica, a minuet filched from the earlier Suite which indulges fond memories of Bach, Haydn and Schubert before tipping us gently into Schnittke’s hallucinatory world of idiomatic dislocation. As the soloist explains, ‘nostalgia’ in the Russian sense of the word implies a painful emotion, to be ‘regarded with respectful fear’. Strongly recommended.