Howard Shelley and the London Mozart Players are no strangers to Johann Baptist Cramer, having recorded the Mannheim-born, London-raised composer/pianist/entrepeneur’s Second, Seventh and Eighth Piano Concertos for Chandos in 2002. Sixteen years later they reconvened to set down Cramer’s Fourth and Fifth Concertos for Hyperion’s Classical Piano Concerto series. Stanley Sadie likened Nos 2, 7 and 8 to ‘less fiery, less purposeful and more decorative manifestations of early Beethoven’, and these words readily apply to the works in hand. Yet Cramer’s piano writing in and of itself is ingenuous, idiomatic and alive, and almost always holds your attention. Like Beethoven, Cramer was fond of subito dynamics, those sudden shifts from soft to loud or loud to soft that momentarily take the listener by surprise, along with unpredictable placement of accents. Listen, for example, to the dramatic build-up and lyrical coming-down from the scales in the transition into the second theme in the Fourth Concerto’s Rondo. In the Fifth Concerto’s first-movement recapitulation, also notice the darting syncopations in the piano part’s busy passagework in dialogue with the strings.

It takes a special kind of pianist to make certain pieces sound better or more important than they actually are, and Shelley certainly knows how to sell Cramer. His inflections of phrase convey palpable tension and release, while long, sustained cantabiles unfold with vocally orientated modulation. Both as soloist and conductor, Shelley pays special attention to the timing and articulation of embellishments, ornaments and roulades, as borne out in the Fifth Concerto’s zesty main theme, plus the brass and timpani’s cutting brilliance. Jeremy Dibble’s superb and musically detailed annotations are most welcome, and so are Hyperion’s well balanced, judiciously resonant sound.