Cellists are fully warranted in their appropriation, via the art of transcription, of works for other instruments. After all, violinists ‘borrow’ Schumann’s Cello Concerto, and the composer sanctioned the transfer between oboe, clarinet and violin of a number of his miniatures, which have also found their way into the occasional repertoires of any number of other instruments.

Going the other way, then, it’s entirely rational to hear Schumann’s First Violin Sonata on the cello. The work is naturally lent a different tinta by the cello’s deeper voice – although much of it can be played at written pitch, as Schumann didn’t seem interested in exploiting the violin’s soaring upper registers in his sonatas. This suits the performance manner of Torleif Thedéen and Marianna Shirinyan, who approach most of the music in this selection in true chamber style, playing as much to each other and to themselves as to the LAWO microphones. Perhaps the cello doesn’t scamper with quite the same impish gait as the violin in the semiquavers of the sonata’s finale but otherwise this is an effective transfer from one instrument to another.

The oblique emotional worlds of Clara Schumann’s Romances also come over well, as does the only work here actually conceived for cello, the teenage Richard Strauss’s Sonata, in which we hear the young composer’s individual voice gradually emerging from the audible shadow of his German predecessors. Thedéen and Shirinyan’s inward performance places this at the opposite end of the spectrum to more outgoing readings by, for example, Steven Isserlis and Connie Shih (Hyperion, 12/22). All that is of a piece with the rapt simplicity of the Schubert and Strauss songs that are placed as palate-cleansers between the two sonatas, and with the tender envoi, Schumann’s ‘Träumerei’. In a programme so imbued with song (and with music by the leading Romantic song-composers), Brahms’s FAE Scherzo is a slightly awkward opener but the rest is eminently pleasing.