Raphaela Gromes / Julian Riem SERENATA ITALIANA

Italy produced a wealth of fine Romantic instrumental music between the late 19th and mid-20th centuries, and some of the names on this disc used to be far more familiar than they are today. So don’t be put off by the packaging: this really isn’t the sort of potboiler you might expect. The young German cellist Raphaela Gromes deserves only applause for putting together such an imaginative debut recital.

The 16-year old Busoni’s skittish, lilting Serenata serves as an overture to the disc’s centrepiece, the Cello Sonata by Giuseppe Martucci. Already, two things are clear: the cello seems to have inspired this particular school of Italian composers to music that’s either melancholy or sparkling. And Gromes makes a very attractive sound, warm but clearly defined at the top, big and sonorous at the bottom. The piano is slightly recessed and the acoustic is generous, which inevitably means that the cello’s C string has a tendency to boom at the expense of Julian Riem’s stylish piano-playing; a minor quibble.

And Gromes clearly feels passionately about the Martucci, which she compares to Brahms, though I found that a little of Martucci’s soaring cello over turbulent piano-writing goes a long way. Matilde Capuis’s wartime Animato con passione contains nothing that would have startled Verdi, but Gromes combines sincere expression and needlepoint brilliance in Sinigaglia’s two miniatures and wraps it all up with an effortlessly nonchalant account of Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s jaw-droppingly flashy paraphrase on Rossini’s ‘Largo al factotum’. Some cellists give a triumphant shout of ‘Figaro!’ at the end of this piece. Gromes, modestly, doesn’t: a shame, because she’s earned it. (Richard Bratby / Gramophone)