Like all the best ideas, this one is simple. To draw attention to the world’s mistreated children, Robert Irvine asked 18 different composers each to write him a short piece for unaccompanied cello. His only stipulations (according to Kate Mollesen’s informative and comprehensive booklet-notes) were that they were to be between three and five minutes in duration, and should be expressive and simple: no ‘special effects or scrapy noises’. This disc collects the results, with all profits being donated to Unicef.

The results are fascinating – and if you enjoy playing ‘guess the composer’, it’ll provide hours of diversion. Irvine’s address book is clearly very well filled, including such names as Sally Beamish, James MacMillan and Mark-Anthony Turnage, as well as many who were new to me. As is so often the way, the limitations of the medium merely heighten the distinctiveness of their voices. With its guitar-like strumming, Duncan Strachan’s Zarabanda weaves a shimmering South American fantasy out of a Baroque dance form. John De Simone’s Misremembrance worries away at a fragment of Bach’s G major Prelude, gradually transmuting the familiar into something deeply strange. Piers Hellawell’s A Frieze and a Lullaby enacts a vast, primal ritual in just under five minutes, while Eleanor Alberga’s Ride Through, based on a Jamaican folksong, alternates quiet reflection and unbuckled joy.

The majority of the pieces tend towards the lyrical and melancholy, though it’s amusing to see who flouts the brief – James MacMillan’s Knock Knock does its own, untameable thing with rough-cut humour. Irvine responds to each piece with the same sincerity, imagination and technical assurance; lovely playing, captured in warm, natural sound. A well-produced document of a very worthwhile project.