Alexander Kniazev is a prize-winning young Russian cellist with an opulent tone. Following his disc of the Bach Cello Suites (Warner, 10/04), he demonstrates what a full-blooded romantic he is in Tchaikovsky performances marked by a free, almost improvisatory, expressive style and a preference for a generous vibrato. In contrast to Steven Isserlis’s recording, Kniazev’s speeds are markedly broader in the Nocturne and the Andante cantabile, the composer’s arrangements of a piano piece and the slow movement of his First String Quartet.

I find the relative restraint of Isserlis is generally preferable and just as tender, particularly when Kniazev’s heavier-handed treatment goes with a recording balance that favours the solo instrument. The wide dynamic range Kniazev employs is compensation and results in magical ‘echo’ effects. Isserlis enterprisingly plays the original version of the Rococo Variations while Kniazev chooses the garbled, but effective, edition from cellist Wilhelm Fitzenhagen which has long held sway. He fully exploits his wide expressive range, though the lighter reading of Han-Na Chang tends to be even more compelling.

The so-called Romances are arrangements for cello and orchestra by Evgeni Stetsuk of 10 songs, including many favourites. Some of the orchestrations of the original piano parts tend to be rather fussy – successive phrases on different instruments, for example, in the introduction to No! there was only one who knew, which turns out to be the song we know as None but the lonely heart. Kniazev is in his element, playing with the kind of natural freedom you would expect of a fine singer. A formidable artist, then, with the Moscow Chamber Orchestra under Constantine Orbelian offering sympathetic support, well recorded if rather backward in the balance.