Having set down Shchedrin’s Parabola concertante with the Southbank Sinfonia (9/08), Raphael Wallfisch here teams up with the veteran composer-pianist himself in a programme for cello and piano with different kinds of Russianness on display. It’s the open-textured spiritual-sounding Shchedrin that informs The Ancient Melodies of Russian Folksongs, a recent setting for cello and piano of five numbers from the seminal anthology of a hundred which Rimsky-Korsakov published in 1877. Wallfisch is the dedicatee, and this is its first recording.

The bigger-boned Cello Sonata (1996) was written for Rostropovich, the recipient of several major compositions by Shchedrin following the collapse of Communism. Although Wallfisch’s technique is sometimes taxed by high-lying declamation, he is an ardent exponent of an idiom not unlike that of late Shostakovich but also reflecting Shchedrin’s immersion in the world of Bach, his fascination with bell-like sonorities and his abiding fondness for the grotesque. The piece ends in mid-air.

The makeweights are more immediately attractive. In the Style of Albéniz, a pop originally for piano, evokes Shchedrin as a post-Prokofievian prankster, cutting a dash in the staid world of Soviet music-making. Likewise the “Quadrille” from the opera Not Love Alone, an arrangement in which the soloist’s romantic aspiration is soon subverted by a parade of folkish material. Early Stravinsky may spring to mind, yet the younger Shchedrin achieved the sound in his own way, deploying the chastushka, a rigidly structured limerick-like popular song form, sometimes bawdy, sometimes satirical. The sound recording is truthful, and there are helpful notes by Calum MacDonald.