This recording traces the heritage of Romanticism in postmodern times. Its vintage opener is the first Cello Sonata by Brahms, a pinnacle of unspeakable but mind-controlled beauty. Martinů’s second Cello Sonata, written in American exile in 1941, revisits Brahms’s old world, but with wider tonality, more expressi- ve shifts, and the extra rhythmic pulse of Czech folk music. In Schnittke’s Cello Sonata of 1978, which builds on Shostakovich’s emaciated style, the ghosts of the desolate closing Largo usher in the death throes of Romanticism.