After Berg, Schoenberg, Bartók and Stravinsky, Isabelle Faust now tackles Britten with Jakub Hrůša and the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, revealing a little-known facet of the British composer. This concerto, highly personal in its language, combines drama with humour, seriousness with satire, in music of overwhelming emotional depth. The programme is completed by early chamber works.

There are curiously few complete cycles of Beethoven's five sonatas for cello and piano, given that the five, unlike the violin sonatas, were almost equally distributed among the composer's early, middle, and late periods, and that each one was in its way a formally daring work. The last two sonatas in particular, with their mysteriously lyrical third relations and compact finales, fugal in the case of the Cello Sonata No. 5 in D major, Op. 102/2, might be regarded as having inaugurated Beethoven's late period.

In his Piano Quartet and Quintet, Schumann revisited the frameworks inherited from Schubert and Beethoven to create astonishingly innovative structures. Their grandiose musical and emotional gestures place these works among his supreme achievements. The prestigious artists assembled here, with their extensive experience of performing Schumann’s chamber music and concertos, do full justice to his imaginative world.

With his First Concerto, the young Brahms set his own course in the wake of Beethoven and Schumann and at the same time poured forth his personal emotions in this work of impressive dimensions. Russian soloist, Alexander Melnikov, has chosen an instrument contemporary with the premiere, a magnificent Blüthner piano from 1859, a perfect match for the Sinfonieorchester Basel under it's British conductor Ivor Bolton. In addition to Brahms's Tragic Overture, the program also includes the much rarer Overture to Éliza, an opera by Cherubini, a composer whom Brahms greatly admired.

Isabelle Faust and Alexander Melnikov present the third volume in their complete set of sonatas on period instruments. Their playing, showing “great elegance and utter rigour,” is distinguished by “a tender and delicate expressiveness served by exceptionally subtle nuances” (Classica).