This survey of American music for cello and piano includes a pair of standard works (the Barber and Foss) and two premiere recordings. Clancy Newman, a winner of the Naumburg Competition, and Natalie Zhu, artistic director of the Kingston Chamber Music Festival in Rhode Island, both received Avery Fisher Career Grants and have been performing together since meeting 25 years ago. Their close rapport can be heard in Barber’s early Cello Sonata (1932), a lyrical work which receives a fervent and fastidious performance. The two musicians pay scrupulous attention to detail: Zhu explores delicate pianissimos and delivers thick chordal writing with sensitive regard for the cello line. Listen to the way the duo smoothly integrate the scampering scherzo-like middle section of the songful Adagio.

The other highlight here is Broken Music, an impressive four-movement sonata by Kenji Bunch (b1973), a viola player and composer based in Portland, Oregon. The opening movement, ‘Broken Voice’, speaks in affecting and often agonised tones, while contrasts of timbre help define the sharp rhythmic contours of the second movement, ‘Broken Chord’, with snap pizzicatos that resemble percussion, cello glissandos and atmospheric soft writing for both players. The third movement, ‘Broken Verse’, is a slow waltz in irregular metre that sustains a spectral ambience before building to an impassioned climax and ultimately leads to a moto perpetuo finale of repetitive force. Bunch has created an imaginative and communicative sonic landscape.

Foss’s Capriccio (1946) is another early work, a witty and incisive opus with an ‘American’ sound, and the two players capture its distinctive voice with impressive control. Clancy Newman is a composer as well as a cellist and her own five-minute From Method to Madness begins with the tranquil cello ‘tuning’ steadily to the piano’s supporting rhythm, the keyboard mirroring the cello’s open fifths. Gradually the tempo animates, the music takes on jazzy inflections and the piece accelerates to the end, culminating in a zesty tune and a frenetic conclusion.

Recommended for the Barber and Kenji Bunch works especially.