LAST YEAR, NANCY GREEN GAVE UP HER professorship at the University of Arizona to devote more time to performing and recording. Education’s loss is our gain, judging from these three very attractive releases from the small JRI label. Alfredo Piatti’s arrangements of the Brahms Hungarian Dances are a real workout for a cellist, full of multiple stops, harmonics, parallel thirds and sixths and octaves, and any number of other challenges. They’re also splendid entertainment. Green throws herself into these pieces, making each dance a little rhapsody. She’s not averse to indulging in tempo extremes, as in the fourth dance, and she employs a free, even swooning, rubato that perfectly conveys the music’s pseudo-gypsy character. More authentically, if subtly, Hungarian are Franz Schmidt’s lovely Fantasy Pieces. Schmidt, like Piatti, was a cellist, and these items are both idiomatic and full of national flavor without phony flamboyance.

The real find among these discs is Ferdinand Ries, a good friend of Beethoven and, as a pianist, a recital partner of cellist Bernard Romberg. Green’s first volume of the Ries cello/piano works in effect gives us two new Beethoven sonatas, so strongly influenced was Ries by his older friend. As annotator Jay Rosenblatt points out, the music combines elements of Beethoven’s “heroic” phase with the somewhat superficial brilliance of Hummel. Green and pianist Babette Hierholzer make the most of this music, in performances that are by turn dramatic and lyrical, and always of great technical facility.

Russian Romantic composer Anton Arensky wrote exactly six pieces for cello and piano in two sets, all of which are offered on a disc dominated by the Rachmaninov sonata. The Arensky items are pleasant little character pieces, just challenging enough to rise above the “salon music” category, although they are hardly profound. More substantial, of course, is the Rachmaninov sonata, in which Green easily holds her own against the dominant piano part, which Frederick Moyer performs with a balance of extroversion and sensitivity. As an example of Green’s work, consider her performance of the scherzo: She can really bite into the music, but she also relishes its openhearted lyricism. Her tone is not lush and Russian, which may disappoint some listeners, but if you can appreciate a leaner sound in this music, Green’s performance is highly rewarding.