Although not in the same league of inspiration, Chopin’s Cello Sonata could perhaps be seen as a tantalising indication of a new direction, as Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony was more than half a century earlier. In this, his last major composition, it offered convincing evidence that Chopin was more than a god of small things.

The first movement in Isserlis’s and Varjon’s hands, goes well beyond anything else he composed in terms of muscular thematic and almost Beethovian emotional complexity, both artists convincingly proving that Chopin was demonstrating his departure from what some regarded as a perfumed salon image. In the Scherzo, they handle the kaleidoscopic (Isserlis’s description) Polish whirls and the tender trio wonderfully; likewise the...