On his first solo recital for ECM New Series, the Hungarian cellist Miklós Perényi builds a programme around a line of inheritance. Benjamin Britten wrote his cello suites for Mstislav Rostropovich after hearing him play Bach, and here his Third Suite, op. 87, is followed by Bach's Sixth Suite in D major, BWV 1012. The disc ends in Perényi's own country with György Ligeti's Sonata for solo cello, an early work that reached print only decades after it was written.

Perényi, once a pupil of Pablo Casals, recorded the programme in November 2009 at the Auditorio of Radiotelevisione svizzera in Lugano, in collaboration with RSI Rete Due. Manfred Eicher produced and Stephan Schellmann was the engineer, and the booklet carries an essay by Paul Griffiths. The album followed Perényi's recordings with András Schiff of Beethoven's complete music for piano and cello, made in 2001 and 2002.

Britten composed the Third Suite in 1971, and Rostropovich, who gave its first performance in December 1974, singled it out among the three suites. Over nine short movements, from the opening Introduzione to the Moto perpetuo, Britten works fragments of four Russian themes into the music without stating them. They emerge whole only in the closing Passacaglia, which is nearly as long as the eight earlier movements together. Perényi's Bach is lighter on its feet, with dancing rhythms in the fast movements and a varied bow stroke in the Sarabande. Ligeti, who had studied the cello himself, wrote his folk-tinged Sonata in the hard years of postwar Hungary. It has two movements, the Dialogo of 1948 and the Capriccio added in 1953. Ligeti only released it for publication in 1979, so as Griffiths points out it stands in the chronology both before and after the Britten.

In The Observer, Fiona Maddocks praised Perényi's “warm, big-boned, springy tone” and the expressive variety he brings to the Britten. William Hedley of MusicWeb International found his Britten “as fine and as moving as any I have heard,” and his playing of the Ligeti astonishingly authoritative.

CD, ECM New Series 2152, released on 27 January 2012, with liner notes by Paul Griffiths.