I feel sure that Gabriel Schwabe has the chops and musical intellect to give a great performance of Kodály’s Solo Sonata. What we have on this new Naxos disc is very good, really, if not quite in the top tier. The German-born cellist keeps the big picture more or less in focus; it’s just some of the details that are fuzzy. Near the end of the first movement, for example, there’s a three-note figure (at 7'32") marked forte with a hairpin crescendo and quick diminuendo to pianissimo. The same three notes reappear a bar later, now marked piano with a slow crescendo, and part of a longer figure with a sforzando accent on a fourth note. Yet Schwabe plays these figures more or less the same, ignoring how this motif has been subtly transformed. Or turn to the finale starting at 6'10", where Kodály asks for soft, high tremolo playing marked by whiplash sforzandos, below which the cellist plays loud pizzicatos. Schwabe’s sforzandos sizzle and his pizzicatos are marvellously sonorous, yet the tremolos are closer to forte than piano. Turn to Julian Steckel’s superb account (AVI-Music, 11/19) to hear how taking the composer at his word makes this passage even more riveting.

Schwabe is at his most impressive in the Adagio, where his pacing and concise phrasing give tautness and shape to the expansive structure. Note, say, how beautifully he binds the bowed melody and plucked accompaniment together at 3'20". His relatively relaxed tempo for the Presto section of the finale (slower than the metronome mark) allows him to make the most of the music’s earthiness, although when heard alongside Steckel, his reading seems to run at a considerably lower voltage.

In the Duo, Schwabe and violinist Hellen Weiss sound very well matched both in tone and temperament, and I very much like the impression of orchestral richness they project at times (as at 3'35" in the first movement), as well as their overarchingly lyrical approach to the work. And sandwiching Ligeti’s slender Solo Sonata between the two big Kodály works is a clever bit of programming (Ligeti freely admitted the influence of the elder Hungarian composer, especially in the sonata’s songful first movement). Miklós Perényi’s interpretation (ECM, 5/12) has greater sweep (and his intensely inky tone makes Schwabe’s seem slightly wan) but it’s a delight to hear Schwabe make a meal of the second-movement Capriccio. His idea of Presto may not be fast but it is furious.