Schnittke’s Cello Concerto No 1 was written in the months after his first devastating stroke in 1985 and gives a grim portrayal of the composer’s psychological terror and disorientation, to the point where you start to empathise. Polystylistic jump-cuts, once the result of political repression, flip inwards as mournful intoning slams against feral, expressionistic orchestral screams. Schnittke lays it on with a trowel, but his genius for building dialectic tension between competing harmonies raises his argument above the vanilla juxtapositions of lesser composers. When Schnittke returned home from hospital he had no memory of sketches he’d already made for his concerto – these narrative disjoints are painfully authentic.

The Concerto is one of Schnittke’s most recorded works, but it would be difficult to imagine a more physically committed performance than Alexander Ivashkin’s. The Cello Concerto No 2 was written in 1990 and is less in-your-face. A Viennese waltz that sounds like it’s been reharmonised by Berg briefly wanders into focus, hinting at Schnittke’s earlier compositional techniques. But “borrowed” reference-points are now more distilled, and the work spends 40 minutes amplifying and reinvestigating the implications of its opening moments, as the orchestra sits on the soloist’s attempts to generate more extended gestures.

Chandos has added Schnittke’s two cello sonatas to this reissued pairing of the concertos. No 1 is archetypal Schnittke, with grave slow opening and closing movements interrupted by the black humour of an intervening Scherzo, in this case characterised by dense tone clusters and bizarre pizzicato cello figurations. Impetus is turned on its head – progress gets increasingly staggered to create a kind of anti-momentum, a paradox that Ivashkin exploits keenly. The aphoristic Second Sonata is less imposing, and the “wrong-note” humour of the Concerto grosso No 2 is not the brand of Schnittke that appeals to me, but that’s neither here nor there – here’s the definitive document of Schnittke’s relationship with the cello.