On The Russian Album, award-winning cellist Christoph Croisé offers two towering 20th-century masterpieces, the Cello Sonatas by Sergei Rachmaninov and Dmitri Shostakovich, alongside miniatures by Sergei Prokofiev, Rodion Shchedrin and his compatriot, the Swiss cellist-composer Thomas Demenga.

In the spring of 2019, Christoph Croisé scored a break-through with his critically acclaimed recording of Haydn’s Cello Concertos (AV 2402). With The Russian Album, he turns his attention to two towering 20th-century masterpieces, Sergei Rachmaninov’s early, eloquent and emotional Sonata for Cello and Piano, Op. 19, and Dmitri Shostakovich’s D minor Sonata for Cello and Piano, Op. 40.

The latter work’s finale featured what would become the composer’s signature style of caricature and irony that proved too provocative to the Stalinist regime.

Croisé also offers two “encores” - his own transcriptions of the March from Sergei Prokofiev’s propulsive opera The Love for Three Oranges, and Rodion Shchedrin’s flambouyant In the Style of Albéniz- and a bonus track by his compatriot, the Swiss cellist and composer Thomas Demenga, New York Honk, a humourous homage to the Big Apple’s cacophonous traffic noises.