Health warning: listening to this disc in a single sitting may exceed your Recommended Daily Allowance of vibrato. Even without a ‘traffic light’ symbol on the packaging, a glance at the title and the track-listing should alert potential listeners. ‘Adagietto’ refers to the fourth movement from Mahler’s Fifth Symphony but Mischa Maisky’s new disc could just as easily be called ‘Andante’, ‘Largo’ or ‘Romance’: 14 tracks, mostly arrangements for cello and piano, all of them slow and sentimental. An album for the Relaxing Classics generation – a lucrative genre for regurgitating record companies’ back catalogues, for sure – but should classical music really be marketing itself as no more than mood music?

Maisky has produced this Deutsche Grammophon disc himself and justifies the arrangements in a booklet interview which smacks of getting one’s retaliation in first. His tone is certainly gloriously rich – the cello equivalent of Sachertorte – but throbbing vibrato is applied like Schlagobers regardless of period or style, so that his Bach sounds indistinguishable from his Massenet. Saint-Saëns’s ‘Mon coeur s’ouvre à ta voix’ is heavily emoted, rather than seductive. ‘October’ from Tchaikovsky’s The Seasons sighs and sobs and swoons.

Maisky is mostly accompanied by his pianist daughter, Lily. She has little more exciting to do than poke a few chords, although she responds to her father’s generous rubato sensitively. In Mahler’s Adagietto, Maisky’s cello is multitracked with additional harp ripples. Schubert’s Notturno, D897, where Sascha Maisky joins his father and sister, is lathered in luxury soap. I had to turn to Andreas Staier and friends on Harmonia Mundi (at basically the same tempo) for an invigorating aural equivalent of a cold shower.

The album ends with two slow movements from piano quartets by Schumann and Brahms, where Mischa Maisky is joined by Janine Jansen and Julian Rachlin and – in the Schumann – by longtime collaborator Martha Argerich. Both movements were recorded in concert in Lucerne (presumably extracted from complete performances) and are the best things on the disc, especially the Schumann, where Argerich keeps a tight rein on the music’s inner pulse.

Maybe this is a disc for the streaming/downloading/shuffle crowd, and it will doubtless delight Maisky’s legion of fans. An individual track here or there makes a pleasant listen. Consume the whole disc at once, though, and you may suffer indigestion.