It’s one thing for a group of musicians to produce a complete chamber works cycle whose separate multifarious-force constituents are conceived to sing together as a single work of art. It’s quite another thing to achieve that aim in an unmistakably audible way. Yet that’s precisely the context into which François Salque and Éric Le Sage’s recording of Brahms’s two cello sonatas is slotting – Vol 7 of a project mounted under the auspices of the Belle Saison network of chamber concert halls, which has seen all of Brahms’s chamber works performed within the space of just a few months by the same group of musicians, recorded live, and preceded by hours of group rehearsal. ‘We are now a company, as in the theatre’, they proclaim in the booklet notes. ‘We know to a T our individual playing characteristics: one player’s touch, another’s bow stroke, each other’s breathing’; and in this case it’s no empty promise.

The two cello sonatas (1862-65 and 1886) were recorded in September 2019 at the Italian-style Théâtre de Coulommiers. Describing an interpretation as being light on surprises might be considered a criticism, but here I’m saying it as an unequivocal compliment. No 1 in E minor first, and beyond perfectly pitched tempos, absolutely everything about Salque’s phrasing in the opening Allegro non troppo just feels right: phrases sound natural, organic, instinctive and unforced through the wax and wane of every line. What’s more, Le Sage provides superglued support with his own finely articulated and sensitive playing. Listen to the way he matches Salque’s curves and subtle rubato around 6'21". The range and thoughtfulness of the dynamics is another joy: take the way both of them manage the hairpin swell at the pizzicato opening of No 2 in F major’s Adagio, taking the diminuendo to an utter whisper via gorgeously soft-focus attack.

Equally to be enjoyed is the transparency and classical-era lightness of their silk-edged sound, even at the climaxes. Returning to the E minor’s Allegro non troppo, jump in at 7'36" to where the cello has its successive fortissimo double-octave D-to-D drops above emphatic piano chords: while this can come out as a fudgy-textured thumper of a passage, it’s no such thing under Salque’s and Le Sage’s fingers. Which brings me to what exactly is under Le Sage’s fingers, because this is very much a contributing element: a Chris Maene Straight Strung Concert Grand Piano – a marvellous collision of past and present which combines the power and technology of a modern concert grand with the straight-strung design seen on pianos before Steinway began crossing the middle register with the bass strings (patented in 1875), and which thus offers a noticeably more transparent middle-register sound in particular, but also bell-like higher registers and full-bodied lower ones.

These qualities reap huge dividends in the F major’s opening Allegro vivace, the piano’s impassioned rippling figurations coming beautifully, brightly delineated and delicately even in their volume, into which Salque’s urgent cello exclamations make wonderfully clean dives.

Add engineering that places you attractively in the hall – front row but not under their noses – and you shouldn’t hesitate with this one.