“1851 – they don’t make years like that any more”. So remarks Steven Isserlis in his introduction to this recital album, built around a year which indeed presented a wealth of fine material. 1851 was the year when manufacturers from all over the world converged in London to display the works of their modern ingenuity at The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry – including the French piano firm Érard, whose instruments’ advanced action scooped them a Gold Medal and the admiring attention of large crowds (and Queen Victoria herself).

For this project, Isserlis borrowed an 1851 Érard from the University of Birmingham – perhaps one of the pianos at the exhibition, although we can’t be sure – for his long time duo partner Connie Shih, and recorded works written in that same year by Robert Schumann and Ignaz Moscheles. The two composers are linked by their respective relationships with Felix Mendelssohn. Schumann’s works were championed and conducted by Mendelssohn, and Moscheles was Mendelssohn’s teacher. Both were pallbearers at Mendelssohn’s funeral in 1847.

True to form, Isserlis has dreamed up a historically evocative programme, and brought us something genuinely new: Schumann’s Violin Sonata, transcribed this time for cello. Schumann’s piece sits exceptionally well here on the cello – this is especially the case in the slow movement. On the violin, the melodic line here can feel low to the point of sounding non-idiomatic, but on the cello it sings throughout. Isserlis’s darkly expressive interpretation is rooted in the theory that Schumann conceived his piece as a passionately grieving memorial to Mendelssohn – it being written for their mutual friend and the dedicatee of Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto, Ferdinand David.

Elsewhere, Isserlis and Shih’s recital of Moscheles’ Cello Sonata in E major (dedicated to Schumann, and coincidentally sharing the same opus number 121 as the Schumann sonata) demonstrates why it was so popular and beloved by Moscheles himself in his time. Generous of proportion, and full of virtuoso piano writing, it dishes up a satisfying blend of drama, optimism and delicacy, with a merry dumka finale that Isserlis and Shih dispatch with fitting folky lightness and dance. Both here and throughout, the combination of Isserlis’s plumply mellow, multicoloured sound and Shih’s nimble partnering on the gracefully responsive Érard is truly stunning.

The album’s shorter pieces give full rein to Isserlis’s formidable lyrical powers: a Romanze by Ferdinand David, originally for the violin; Isserlis’s own transcription of the Schumann lied, Sängers Trost (“The Poet’s Comfort”); then Gesualdo Six joining Isserlis and Shih for a tenderly ravishing recreation of an early performance of Gounod’s “Ave Maria” transcription of JS Bach’s first Well-Tempered Clavier prelude, for which Gounod is reported to have piano-accompanied a violinist while a six-voice choir sang Latin words from an adjoining room. The latter work isn’t quite the outlier that it sounds: Gounod’s passion for Bach was kindled by Mendelssohn, and whilst the piece was published in 1853, there’s every chance that it was composed closer to 1851. In short, it’s an utter delight.