The Naxos disc offers an attractive Haydn medley. Both the Harpsichord Concerto and the Double Concerto, both from the 1750s, were conceived for organ (without pedals). Their first movements tend to meander amiably but inconsequentially, and their aria-like slow movements have a fragile rococo charm. Most fetching are the gamesome finales. Playing on a silvery-toned single-manual harpsichord, Harald Hoeren gives a deft and (in the finale) spirited performance. In the Double Concerto he switches to fortepiano and relishes his bouts of elegant badinage with violinist Ariadne Daskalakis.

Dmitri Babanov is a secure, smooth-toned soloist in the lively Horn Concerto of 1762, coping fluently both with Haydn’s frequent descents into the underworld and the comically spluttering repeated notes in the finale. Accompaniments, here and elsewhere, are reliable rather than inspiring, and the harpsichord continuo tends to pound too enthusiastically for my taste. The late Trumpet Concerto – by far the finest work on the disc – is dispatched in enjoyably bright, forthright style by Jürgen Schuster, though he rather jabs at the main theme of the finale.

Haydn and Hummel composed their concertos for Anton Weidinger’s newfangled keyed trumpet, whose timbre was appreciably softer than the natural trumpet (contemporaries likened it to an oboe or clarinet). More than any performance I know, Schuster’s included, Alison Balsom brings out the mellow, even veiled, colouring of so much of the writing. Where clarion brilliance is in order she can peal out with the best of them. But what lingers in the memory is the lyrical grace of her phrasing, and her delicacy of shading.

In the entertaining Hummel Concerto, with its palpable Mozart cribs, she mingles tonal subtlety and swagger in the opening movement, spins a refined, beautifully modulated line in the slow movement, and makes the finale’s pyrotechnics properly dazzling. The spruce Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie match her all the way in sensitivity and rhythmic verve.

Moving back in time, Balsom savours the bold, bugling fanfares of Torelli’s miniature concerto and makes a persuasive case for a pleasant, if hardly distinctive, mid-18th-century concerto by the Czech Johann Baptist Neruda, written for the corno da caccia but forgivably pilfered by trumpeters hard-up for solo concertos. In sum, a stunning recital from a poet of this traditionally martial instrument.