Truls Mørk, you have to admit, is a very cool name for a cellist. A native of Norway, Mørk is a cellist whose tone ranges from intimate pianissimos to immense fortissimos without ever losing its essential combination of passionate lyricism and cool lucidity, a cellist whose interpretations range from blissful joy to endless despair without every losing its fundamental balance of total dedication and cool objectivity, a cellist, in short, who lives up to his name.

Listeners who think they know Schubert's popular Quartettsatz in C minor and String Quintet in C major should try this 2008 recording of those works by the Artemis Quartet. The driving Quartettsatz beginning the disc is justly famous for inaugurating Schubert's maturity as a chamber music composer, but the tender Andante following it here is a rarely recorded fragment that would have furnished the Quartettsatz with a slow movement had Schubert completed the movement.

Icelandic composer Haflidi Hallgrímsson began his career as a cellist and was the principal cellist with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra before retiring to devote himself to composition. It's especially fitting, then, that the Scottish Chamber Orchestra plays two of his works for cello and orchestra on this CD, his Herma (1995) and Cello Concerto (2003). Hallgrímsson wrote the concerto for featured soloist Truls Mørk, who has performed it, as well as Herma, many times.

The essence of Camille Saint-Saëns' music comes through perhaps most clearly in his music for solo instrument and orchestra, which exemplifies his elegant combination of melody and conservatory-generated virtuosity. The two cello concertos are here, plus a pair of crowd-pleasing short works for piano and orchestra, and the evergreen Carnival of the Animals, with pianists Louis Lortie and Hélène Mercier joining forces along with a collection of instruments that includes the often-omitted glass harmonica. There are all kinds of attractions here: the gently humorous and not over-broad Carnival, the songful cello playing of Truls Mørk, and the little-known piano-and-orchestra scene Africa, Op. 89, with its lightly Tunisian flavor (sample this final track). But really, the central thread connecting them all is the conducting of Neeme Järvi and the light, graceful work of the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra; French music is the nearly 80-year-old Järvi's most congenial environment, and in this recording, perhaps his last devoted to Saint-Saëns, he has never been better.

Beethoven's Triple Concerto works best when played like a svelte, bubbly concerto grosso rather than middle-period Beethoven pretending to be Elgar. For that to happen, you need a firm, decisive podium master who keeps everything clear and moving ahead. And you need three virtuoso soloists with rhythmic élan, beautiful tone, and radar-like ensemble sensitivity. Enter Zinman, Bronfman, Shaham, Mørk, and Zurich. No, that's not a law office, but rather the musician participants, who embody all the aforementioned criteria and come up with the best-integrated, least-platitudinous, most consistently characterized and caringly detailed Beethoven Triple Concerto ever committed to disc.

Vadim Repin’s DG debut with the Wiener Philharmoniker under Riccardo Muti gave the musical world and his many fans exactly what was expected of this first-class violinist: an incomparably refined, technically brilliant and at the same time highly emotional interpretation of Beethoven’s Violin Concerto.