The three sonatas are here given warm and inspired performances by the Armenian-born cellist Alexander Chaushian with Yevgeny Sudbin, his chamber music partner of long standing, at the piano. The two have previously recorded sonatas by Mieczyslaw Weinberg for BIS (BISCD1648); a disc which was hailed as ‘the best possible case for a reappraisal of this undervalued composer’ by BBC Music Magazine, while the reviewer for International Record Review believed it ‘difficult to imagine finer performances than these’. Composed between 1860 and 1934, the works on this disc hail from a momentous period in Russian music – from the emergence of a national Russian school of composing advocated by the group called ‘The Mighty Five’, to Stalin’s denunciation of Shostakovich’s opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, which was to cause generations of Russian composers to harness their modernist leanings.