Adaptations of Schubert range from faithful transcriptions to more intricate amplifications and radical realisations such as Berio’s Rendering. Since the blurb for this collection advertises it as ‘unique’ and aimed at ‘revitalising’ Schubert’s music, we’re led to expect reimaginations towards the extreme end.

That expectation is largely unfulfilled. True, the programme begins with a jolt: Simon Parkin’s reconception of the Adagio from the String Quintet for cello and a male vocal consort singing fragments of Heine’s ‘Wo wird einst des Wandermüden’. Here, Parkin transforms not only the colours but also the balances, moving the cellist from line to line (although concentrating on the first violin part) and in the process turning the work into a cello concerto. Nothing else, though, lives up to this overture.

Nearly half the disc is taken up by the Sonata, which hardly fits the album’s theme. Even though it was originally written for the arpeggione, Schubert suspected – as Katy Hamilton suggests in her notes – that that instrument had no future, and ‘the material is almost all perfectly playable on a standard cello’. Far from representing ‘Schubert Reimagined’, it’s a familiar staple of the cello repertoire.

The other pieces tread lightly on Schubert’s originals. Their new colours are unprovocative; in fact, they’re fairly familiar, since performances of the songs on cello are common. The added decorations are equally discreet: a cello obbligato circles around the choral original of ‘Die Nacht’ (extended with a hummed repeat of the first section); the Winterreise songs are elaborated with tasteful horn calls added by Professor Timothy Jones (not the Timothy Jones, longtime principal of the LSO, who plays the horn parts). There’s nothing here as texturally inventive as Godowsky’s Schubert reworkings or as timbrally ingenious as Berlioz’s orchestration of ‘Erlkönig’.

Whatever you think about the arrangements, though, you’re apt to be drawn in by the performances. ‘Der Doppelgänger’ is especially notable for its sensitivity to weight and colour, its flexible phrasing and Josephine Knight’s finely judged vibrato. More generally, the playing is patient and emotionally controlled. Thus, in the sonata’s finale, the players eschew the lift of Feuermann (5/63) and the volatility of Shafran (11/68), choosing instead to draw our attention to the music’s subtler and often mournful beauties. Throughout, Knight is sympathetically matched by her colleagues, and the engineering is excellent.