Julian Lloyd Webber has joined forces with conductor Sir Neville Marriner to produce this moving new recording of two great cello works. For the Britten, Lloyd Webber makes his cello hum with questing intensity and dark-hued rumblings. He imbues the work with a warped sweetness and a rugged grandeur which brings out the work's rather Russian feel (it was, after all, written for Rostropovich). Marriner dictates a slow, inexorable tread - the sad, plangent melodies are deliberately trampled underfoot Even the sense of calm in the last movement here seems illusory - a submission, not a resolution. In the Walton too, there is a haunting, unsettling quality to the performance. A disc to test your emotions and your nerve.

James Inverne