Prokofiev’s ‘First’ Cello Concerto in E Minor, Op. 58 had a troubled existence and found little favour with the public. It was not until an encounter with Mstislav Rostropovich that it was successfully performed. However, Prokofiev had developed doubts about its form and asked Rostropovich to help restructure it. The result was the so-called Sinfonia Concertante, Op. 125, a vastly different work, which came in time to entirely eclipse its predecessor. Neither work shows Prokofiev at his creative zenith: the Op. 125 is bizarre and rambling in parts and has never become a repertoire staple.

Steven Isserlis has been one of the world’s leading cellists for a generation and seems artistically incapable of playing a dud note, let alone giving a dud performance, but, when I read one reviewer’s cynical comment on a live Isserlis performance of the original Op. 58 (that it was what you exhumed when you’d recorded just about everything else in the cello repertoire), I instinctively agreed.

Isserlis’s liner notes are persuasively eloquent, and although they still have a whiff of special pleading, his sheer panache never diminishes the ruggedness and cartoonish gallows humour of this oddity. He also sounds as though he’s having the fun of Cork.

As...