Between the track listing and the booklet note for this entertaining, if in some respects, quizzical release comes an oddball tale by Daniil Kharms where a group of city travellers are unknowingly connected by a bizarre sequence of past events. Kremerata Baltica’s fifth birthday programme, beautifully recorded at various German venues between 1999 and 2001, mirrors Kharms’s fable with some unexpected musical teasers.

Tbilisi-born Vato Kakhidze provides the mellowest strand with his Blitz Fantasy (1999) – ‘so titled because it was composed in a very short time’ – folk-inspired, richly harmonised, melancholic and subtly seasoned with a pinch of jazz. Schnittke’s racy opening Polka (1979) was composed in a trice for Gennadi Rozhdestvensky’s son, and Peter Heidrich’s ‘Happy Birthday’ Variations (1994) is a Face the Music-style sequence fashioned ‘in the manner of…’ Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Schumann and a host of varied genres. A real hoot, though not as much as Franz Waxman’s ‘Auld Lang Syne’ Variations, composed for a 1947 New Year’s Party and premièred on the night by Jascha Heifetz, William Primrose, Gregor Piatigorsky and Waxman himself at the piano. Waxman’s 13-minute, four-movement Piano Quartet calls on Mozart, Beethoven and Bach for the rib-tickling first three movements while the finale – a spot of real genius – is a ‘Hommage to Shostakofiev’, ‘Shosta…’ quoting his First Symphony and Piano Trio, ‘…ofiev’, his Second Violin Concerto.

The Paganini disciples Servais and Ghys provide ‘God Save the King’ Variations (c1850), not especially memorable as music but exceptionally well played by cellist Marta Sudraba and, in particular, Kremer himself. Teddy Bor’s 1991 McMozart’s Eine Kleine Bricht Moonlicht Nicht Musik takes the opening of Mozart’s first movement and threads it, rondo-like, among various Celtic songs. Tchaikovsky’s amiable if repetitive Elegy dates from 1884 and was later re-used as part of his Hamlet incidental music, and Ladislav Kupkovic’s Souvenir of 1971 superimposes gypsy-style gestures atop the bouncing strings accompaniment to Strauss’s Perpetuum mobile.

But, really, you have to hear it for yourself…the flashes of wit, the sighs, the zany juxtapositions, the many seductive shades and colours. One’s listening attitude should reflect the spirit in which this CD was made: in other words, listening for fun – the sort of fun that also makes you ponder, at least momentarily. And of course there’s the playing, which is consistently first-rate.