Is it worth mentioning of a solo instrumental recital recorded during the summer of 2020 that it was born as a Covid lockdown project? Perhaps not, when so many were. Still, that’s what Steven Isserlis’s programme of 20th-century British solo cello music was; although note also that this isn’t another living-room recording but instead was captured in the warmth of London’s Henry Wood Hall.

As ever with Isserlis, his conversational booklet notes, with their plethora of personal anecdotes and musicological musings, are an integral part of the pleasure. So in this case we learn that his starting point was Frank Merrick’s Suite in the Eighteenth-Century Style (written some time before 1935, although its exact date is unknown), which appropriately enough the elderly Merrick had equally found in a box, having forgotten he’d even composed it – to be handed straight to the teenage Isserlis, who had been asking him whether he’d written any cello works beyond his Sonata. This is the Suite’s first recording (although a young Isserlis did tape an earlier one, in Merrick’s presence, but it’s long lost), and its tonal language is far from the Bach homage that its title might have you anticipating. Instead think Handel, and often with the sort of generous, big-boned writing – plumply golden-toned and rhythmically dancing – that has you hearing orchestral textures in your head.

Neither the track-listing nor Isserlis himself make a thing of announcing the programme’s premiere recordings and general originalities, but they don’t stop with the Merrick. For instance, a teeny gem that doesn’t appear to have previously made it to disc is John Gardner’s lilting Coranto pizzicato, emulating Elizabethan lute music, from the central section of his Partita for solo cello of 1968, plucked by Isserlis with nimble, sunny whimsy. Meanwhile, Walton’s Theme for a Prince, composed in 1969 for Prince Charles’s 21st birthday, rarely gets a recorded outing, yet its blink-and-you’ll-miss-it 16 bars come with a spacious, lyrical beauty from Isserlis that’s been stopping me in my tracks on each fresh hearing. Or there’s Isserlis’s postscripting of Britten’s dark Third Cello Suite – a multi-hued reading of immense beauty that rings with the impression of emotional authenticity – with four traditional Russian themes Britten borrowed for it: singing renditions of three folk songs taken from a collection of arrangements by Tchaikovsky, for which Mishka Rushdie Momen makes a satisfying cameo as accompanying pianist, followed by Isserlis playing all five parts of his own chorale arrangement of the Russian Orthodox ‘Kontakion’ chant for the dead. The latter is ravishing, austere phrasing setting off his rich, penetrating tone, throbbing vocal-style vibrato and rubato shifts.

Perhaps what I value most about this programme, though, is the supple, lyric beauty Isserlis draws from his 1726 ‘Marquis de Corberon’ Stradivarius at every turn, and particularly in the Britten Suite. We critics often relish it when an artist isn’t afraid of a bit of ugly in the pursuit of making a searing point. Yet Isserlis reminds us that it’s possible to bring tonal beauty to even the most pained musical expression without pulling any emotional punches – a thought which, in the context of the programme’s lockdown origins, feels especially apt.