Although entitled ‘Russian Trumpet Sonatas’, this album featuring eight Soviet-era sonatas is really the story of two intrepid trumpeters. One, Georgy Antonovich Orvid (1904 80), commissioned four of the sonatas and almost single-handedly generated the trumpet sonata form as a concert item in mid-20th-century Russia; the other is Iskander Akhmadullin (b1970) who, with his pianist wife Natalia Bolshakova accompanying, performs this intriguing survey of unfamiliar Soviet music.

It is to be regretted that Orvid did not persuade some of the premier-league Soviet composers like Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Myaskovsky or Khachaturian to compose solo sonatas for his instrument. Varied as the present clutch is, the programme lacks any truly standout works, despite the many intricacies of the writing. Akhmadullin is very informative on the demands on the players, for example in Yuri Chichkov’s all-too-brief single-movement Sonatina in G flat (1950), given here in Akhmadullin’s transposition to G major, which gallantly transfers the trickier challenges from the keyboard to the trumpet.

The works are presented in more or less chronological sequence and it is the later ones – by Leonid Lyubovsky (1969), Gherman Okunev (1970, again all too brief), Alexander Baryshev (1970) and Aida Isakova (1986) – that prove the most interesting musically. At 16'25" in length, Isakova’s is by some distance the longest and weightiest – indeed, the only weighty – item on the disc, its Andante-Allegro-Andante opening movement alone larger than all the other works bar those of Nikolai Platonov (c1962; a virtuoso test piece but musically forgettable), Yuri Aleksandrov (c1964) and Mark Milman’s noisy but empty single span (1962). Isakova’s and Okunev’s are the only works that allow both players to display their musicality as strongly as their considerable agility. Good, rather clinical, close-miked sound.