Steven Isserlis / Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra / Paavo Järvi PROKOFIEV - SHOSTAKOVICH Cello Concertos

Prokofiev’s demanding, conceptually lopsided Cello Concerto, failed at the box office and has been little heard. Indeed, the only significant on-disc competition for Steven Isserlis’s blazing live account comes from the 2000 recording made by the late Alexander Ivashkin. With a Russian cellist and orchestra, the music sounds deceptively ‘Soviet’ so that we experience it counterfactually as a variant of the entity it would become years later when refashioned for Mstislav Rostropovich as the Symphony-Concerto, Op 125. Isserlis’s reading may yet mark a step change in the reception history of the 1930s original. No matter that Paavo Järvi’s accompaniment feels super-efficient rather than comparably spontaneous. Applause is excised.

While you might not consider the hard-edged companion concerto a natural Isserlis piece, the cellist has played it a good deal. Distinctly brisk, except in the initial Allegretto, the new studio interpretation is flexible rather than lightweight or disconnected in feeling, with no lack of soulful emoting. In the first movement Isserlis conjures some surprising, visceral sounds from his instrument, ratcheting up the tension with a febrile, nervy vibrato up high. Being less comatose than usual, the second movement can afford to proceed in longer breaths, the not-quite-immaculate solo line spurning vibrato one moment, sliding romantically the next.

Yes, Rostropovich was grand and implacable, more lyrical too in a sense, but you’ll have one or other of his Shostakovich recordings already and he was understandably committed to the revamped version of the Prokofiev. The present disc has its own built-in encore, as arranged by Gregor Piatigorsky, the émigré virtuoso for whom Prokofiev began his concerto and with whom Isserlis himself intended to study. The soloist contributes his own lively and individualistic booklet-notes, enhancing the value of a fascinating, I’d say unmissable project. Sympathetic miking ensures that his relatively modest sound is never swamped even if the suggestion of insectile buzzing is not wholly avoided. (Gramophone)