Performing ‘light’ (for want of a better term) music on period instruments is an idea whose time has come. Following Bru Zane’s period-instrument Offenbach and the OAE’s (regrettably unrecorded) adventures with G&S comes the ‘Strauss of the North’: Hans Christian Lumbye, given a brisk dusting-down and sprucing-up by Lars Ulrik Mortensen and Concerto Copenhagen. Well, ‘Lumbye and his Idols’, to be precise, with Strauss senior’s Champagner-Walzer and Lanner’s ever-delightful Die Mozartisten.

Mortensen deploys a 29-piece orchestra – the instrumentation that Lumbye used at Copenhagen’s Tivoli Gardens in the 1840s. Straight away, in numbers such as the Andante cantabile e Tarantella (a premiere recording) and the Rossini-inspired Figaro Waltz, you feel the springiness of that lean 11-player string section, the way the basses drive the music from the bottom, and the raffish, military-band flair of the woodwind and brass. The (excellent) booklet notes tell us that Lumbye drew many of his players from army bands: the sound is not brash but it has a bracing swagger and snap. Shrilling clarinets and piccolo give a Schrammel-band tanginess to the Viennese numbers.

The real fun, though, is on the back row: with deliciously toylike tuned percussion, sizzling cymbals in the Tsching-Tsching Polka (intended to promote Tivoli’s Chinese Bazaar) and any number of colourful effects – anvils, birdcalls, you name it – in the splendidly-titled Echo from the Old Gods at Tivoli Island galop. I only wish they’d included the Copenhagen Steam Railway galop. Maybe next time: right now I couldn’t love anyone who wasn’t charmed by this utterly delightful disc.