As on an earlier Haydn disc with tenor James Taylor (12/05), Orfeo here recreate an evening’s domestic music-making c1800. Scottish folksong arrangements for James Thomson – measured by pfennigs per quaver, probably the most lucrative commission of Haydn’s whole career – frame two of the late piano trios and six of the enchanting canzonettas he composed on his second London visit. With her fresh, silvery tone, grace of phrase and lively understanding, American soprano Julie Kaufmann is a persuasive advocate of both folksongs and canzonettas. She catches the elegiac tenderness of the exquisite “Tears that must ever fall” as surely as the ribald energy of “Maggy Lauder”, and manages a convincing Scottish brogue without seeming to try too hard. Intentionally or not, Kaufmann also sounds as if she hails from over the border (“heerr” for “hair” and so on) in the English canzonettas, sung with spirit and un-winsome charm – considerable intensity, too, in the impassioned “Fidelity”. Donald Sulzen and his string colleagues make much of Haydn’s inventive preludes and postludes in the folksongs, though in the canzonettas Sulzen is efficient rather than especially subtle or poetic.

Enjoyment was distinctly muted in Haydn’s two most celebrated keyboard trios: skilled performances short on fantasy, fire and variety of touch, even more so by comparison with Trio Wanderer, the Florestan Trio and, in No 25, the Vienna Piano Trio. Slow movements tend to plod (the Andante in the C major hampered by lumbering ritardandi), while the Munich Trio’s measured pace tames the vaulting, muscular energy of the C major’s opening Allegro. The “Rondo in the Gypsies’ Style”, as Haydn dubbed it, is also too temperate, with barely a whiff of the wild Hungarian puszta. Not for the only time I wanted a lustier, more incisive contribution from the cellist. In sum, a Haydn soirée of mixed pleasures, recommended primarily for Kaufmann’s delightful performances of the folksongs and the little-recorded canzonettas.