It seems that Schubert has become a go-to composer when it comes to contrasting classical-romantic sublimity with more challenging, if no less profound, music from 200 years or so later. Schoenberg is a popular landing pad, but to couple Shostakovich’s very last completed work, a mostly sombre viola sonata, with affable music that Schubert wrote for the arpeggione or ‘guitarre d’amour’, a bowed instrument with six strings cast somewhere between a guitar and a cello (the latter instrument usually suffices nowadays), is especially imaginative.

The valedictory Shostakovich opens to a plucked melody before switching to a soulful legato. The second movement resembles a dry-as-dust polka with a contrasting shadowy slower section, but it’s the expansive finale, ‘an adagio in memory of Beethoven’ (the Moonlight Sonata’s opening Adagio sostenuto is its principal source), that has inspired the widest range of interpretative options, stretching, time-wise, from 11'50" – Isabelle van Keulen and Ronald Brautigam (Challenge Classics) – to Alexander Hülshoff and Andreas Frölich (VMS) at 19'09" and the workable mid-way point of the recording under review by Andreas Willwohl and Daniel Heide, who stretch the closing elegy to a sensible but affecting 15'25". Good as this latest version is, my first choice for this great work would be Lawrence Power and Simon Crawford-Phillips (Hyperion, 4/12; Adagio, 13'15")

The Schubert is granted its full measure of charm, and once adjusted to the viola’s lighter baritone, all you hear is beautiful music sensitively performed. The central Adagio works especially well, while the happy closing Allegretto drops you without warning at the precipice’s edge, where Shostakovich and his auguries of death lie in wait. I doubt you’ll want to hear the two works paired more than very occasionally. For me, once is more than enough. But that’s the beauty of recordings: you have the privilege of choosing. Still, rest assured that the playing throughout is excellent, and so is the sound.