Joseph Martin Kraus was an accomplished artist at both keyboard and violin, and like his contemporary Mozart, he turned to the violin concerto in his early 20s. His single work is more ambitious in breadth and soloistic scope than any of Mozart’s five, though it opens in a perfectly unassuming C major. The 15-minute first movement spurns both the fireworks and the banality of a Viotti concerto. Only clarinets and horns supplement the string band; the tension is not high but quietly compelling. Kraus’s music is athletic in mind and body. You never know where it will go next, even in the more good-natured convention of the final rondo, which vanishes with even greater wit and less ceremony than Mozart’s Fifth.

Given all of which, it is a pity that Naxos did not hold faith with the Swedish Chamber Orchestra, who have distinguished the Kraus series so far with lithe and attentive playing. The greater numbers of the New Zealand orchestra count against the supple responses and prompt attack that Kraus invites, and Uwe Grodd’s direction is sluggish. Takako Nishizaki’s wide vibrato fails to hold the line or pitch in the slow movement, and though she makes a sweet enough sound with her “del Gesù”, I feel that the overall form of the work has been little more than sketched out.

The theatre music fares better with a larger band, especially the incidental music to Olympie. This Classical story of doomed love and mass suicide inspired Kraus to write an overture of violent contrasts and symphonic force, with some equally arresting shorter interludes and marches. It all rather whets the appetite for a recording of his grand opera Aeneas at Carthage, composed half a century before Les Troyens.