Chamber music is an intimate genre, that we know. But in the case of Felix Mendelssohn’s cello works, it was also family-inspired. His younger brother Paul was obviously a good cellist, and it was to him that Felix dedicated his two cello sonatas and his Variations concertantes Op. 17. Daniel-Müller-Schott presents all three works here, accompanied by Jonathan Gilad at the piano. The playful virtuosity of the Variations, modelled after Mozart and Beethoven, inspires the duo to virtuosic brilliance, be it in the passionate eruptions in the seventh variation or the superb, subtle coda as it fades away. The First Cello Sonata is also light and airy, and the Müller-Schott/Gilad duo savour its prevailingly cheerful, merry mood. The grace and passion that Mendelssohn’s contemporaries already admired in him are here to be found throughout.

In the Second Sonata, we find the most beautiful melodies alongside moments of drama and sound colours that seem not so far removed from the world of Mendelssohn’s Midsummer Night’s Dream. Müller-Schott and Gilad here pull out all the stops. Orfeo also offer two shorter works for the same instruments: an ‘Assai tranquillo’ in B minor and a ‘Song without words’ in D major Op. 109 that is graceful in its outer sections, more agitated in the middle. These frame two song arrangements by Daniel Müller-Schott, wholly Mendelssohnian in style: two works of melancholic, cantabile melodic lines that ‘sing’ beautifully even without the words of Heine or Lenau.