in the String Quintet in D minor G280 – the album’s centrepiece – Isserlis and friends entwine Boccherini’s lyrical strands into a felicitous musical conversation: balanced, measured and fully in keeping with his gallant idiom.

This is elegant playing, for sure, but it has an irresistible glint in its eye. Isserlis finds a near-ideal tension between lyricism and effervescence.

It’s a surprisingly chamber-oriented album, with even the two cello concertos inhabiting an astonishingly delicate, translucent sound-world. The first concerto makes a striking impression with some very high writing for the soloist, often duetting with the first violin on almost equal terms. It put me in mind of the great violist Lionel Tertis’s version of Elgar’s cello concerto (recorded last year by Timothy Ridout) – if I didn’t already know these were cello works, I could have been fooled into thinking I was hearing a viola.

The music flows with a natural ease and a lively disposition, and often exploits the cello’s top register, requiring extra dexterity. No problem for Isserlis. Elsewhere, everyone skips along benignly in music that regularly changes mood without losing its poise.

[Isserlis] and his Enlightenment chums skip along, gracefully sigh, or do anything else required by music that regularly changes mood without losing its elegant poise. Buy this album immediately, for Boccherini’s music, like good bath salts, stimulates and relaxes at the same time.