This disc’s title led me to expect cello and-piano arrangements of the Liebeslieder Waltzes, and my heart leapt at the idea. But there are no waltzes here. Instead, Bertrand and Amoyel offer a selection of seven songs (‘Liebeslieder’ is their title, not Brahms’s). Was I disappointed? Yes, but my disappointment was instantly eased by the interpretations, for while many cellists have turned Brahms’s lieder into ‘songs without words’, few have managed the transformation with such skill and thought. Take, for example, the ‘Sapphische Ode’. Mischa Maisky – whose song arrangements appear on two DG recordings (11/97 and 10/99) – plays it rather lugubriously, ignoring the fact that Brahms wanted a feeling of two beats to a bar rather than four. Bertrand and Amoyel give it a real vocal lilt, and while some may bristle at the cellist’s appropriation of a few notes of the piano part (between the first stanza’s second and third lines), the result makes musical sense to my ear.

There’s more to the programme than just the title, too, for Bertrand and Amoyel connect the songs and the sonatas in unexpected ways. There’s definitely something affectingly songlike in the way they articulate and inflect the opening Allegro non troppo of the E minor First Sonata, for example. Equally impressive is the fearless way they explore the movement’s darkest recesses – note, say, the recapitulation’s air of intense melancholy (starting at 9'35"), or their dangerously slow tempo in the E major coda, which put me in mind of Sviatoslav Richter playing late Schubert. Indeed, I never noticed how, in this music, Brahms seems to be recalling ‘Des Baches Wiegenlied’, the last song in Die schöne Müllerin (also in E) – another connection to song.

What’s remarkable given all this specificity is that these are largely unfussy performances. In the F major Second Sonata, for instance, Bertrand and Amoyel bring a sense of flow and purpose to the Adagio affettuoso, and they manage to keep the scherzo-like third movement light on its feet without compromising the music’s emotional weight. Similarly, Bertrand’s phrasing in ‘Wiegenlied’ is entirely without affectation, and she and Amoyel are refreshingly straightforward in the two best-known Hungarian Dances (not on the CD but included in the digital release).

It’s rare to find interpretations that marry insight and naturalness, and that sends this recording to very near the top of an imposingly tall heap.