The historically valuable DG ‘Mozart’s Mannheim’ release arrives swathed in a robe of academic authority. ‘Mozart’s correspondence reveals how he encountered the leading musicians of the Mannheim court orchestra’, we’re told; furthermore that ‘there were those such as [Christian] Cannabich with whom he became friends, those from whom he remained distant and those such as [Georg Joseph] Vogler for whom he harboured a certain animosity’. Cannabich’s Symphony No 55 opens ceremoniously, though there’s plenty of light and shade within its borders. Carl Joseph Toeschi’s Sextet in B flat for flute, oboe, violin, viola, bassoon and cello witnesses a fair amount of inner dialogue bubbling away and there’s a pleasant if bland Violin Concerto by Christian Danner, where the soloist (the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra’s music director and leader Gottfried von der Goltz) dances on to the canvas and elsewhere shows considerable agility in fast passagework.

As for Mozart himself, the recitative and aria for soprano and orchestra Alcandro, lo confesso … Non so d’onde viene, K294, finds the musically responsive Nicole Chevalier delivering clean trills aboard a bright, rich tone. And then there’s the Symphony in C, K208/102, with its hint of a Mannheim crescendo near the opening and the charming central Andantino reconstructed by Bärbel Pelker. As DG’s excellent annotator Rüdiger Thomsen Fürst explains, the opening movement is the Sinfonia to the dramma per musica Il re pastore, K208, which was first performed in Salzburg in 1775, while the charming slow movement is the opening aria from the opera, with Aminta’s vocal line rewritten for a solo oboe. Only the final Presto assai is new.

The programme opens assertively with music by Vogler and also includes a dramatic piece by Ignaz Holzbauer, the overture to Der Kaufmann von Smyrna by the former and the latter’s overture to Günther von Schwarzburg. The Vogler, Cannabich, Danner and Toeschi items are all premiere recordings. With winning performance standards and exceptionally fine sound (notably rich at the bass end of the spectrum), this is an interesting programme that provides a valuable context for the Mozart of the period.

Another composer whose work follows the model of the Mannheim School is a genuine original, Bamberg-born Joseph Aloys Schmittbaur (1718-1809), who as well as being a composer was a Kapellmeister, instrument maker and music teacher. Of the three Op 2 symphonies programmed by L’Arte del Mondo under Werner Ehrhardt, perhaps the most immediately appealing is No 3 in B flat, a striking piece and the ideal ‘next step’ for those with a taste for Haydn’s Hornsignal Symphony (written around 10 years earlier), with its heraldic horns, brash first-movement tutti passages, ‘oompah’-accompanied waltzing Allegretto second movement (there are allusions to Haydn’s ‘Emperor’s Hymn’), bold Menuetto with a harmonically outreaching Trio and wildly scampering Presto assai finale. Horns again predominate for much of the E flat Symphony, Op 2 No 1, with its gracefully mellifluous second movement, while oboes play a prominent role in the Symphony in F, Op 2 No 2, certainly in its vigorously Mozartian first movement.

We’re told that the Symphony in C belongs to a later period in Schmittbaur’s creative development (by roughly 20 years). It is intriguingly subtitled ‘On the Occasion of the Princess’s Marriage’, the reason being that Caroline, the eldest daughter of the prince of Baden and later Bavaria’s first queen, married Duke Maximilian Joseph of Zweibrücken-Birkenfeld on March 9, 1797, in Karlsruhe. It was for her marriage that Schmittbaur wrote this colourful, light-hearted symphony, which toys with our expectations much as Haydn had done years earlier. Try the furious Prestissimo finale as an example of Schmittbaur firing off on all cylinders. This is an altogether terrific disc (again featuring premiere recordings), with music of a high calibre and performances by L’Arte del Mondo that could hardly be bettered.