The charming music Johan Helmich Roman composed in 1744 for the wedding festivities of Adolf Fredrik, Crown Prince of Sweden, and Princess Lovisa Ulrika of Prussia is not unknown. The most recent recording of it came only a few months ago from Andrew Manze and the Helsingborg Symphony Orchestra (BIS, 9/10), and parts of it can be encountered at modern-day Swedish marriage services. Not that many 21st-century couples can expect to spend three days celebrating, as Adolf and Lovisa did, or to receive a comparable wedding present; the day after the consummation they were handed the royal palace of Drottningholm itself.

Roman’s music is a loose suite of 24 short pieces of varying types and moods, rather in the mould of Handel’s Water Music. The overall atmosphere is similar too, and one can hardly fail to think of Handel’s famous collection when the trumpets and horns call to each other in No 20. But Handel is not the only flavour here: Telemann is a lively and obvious model, there are pockets of French gentility and Roman’s own personality shows in some very shapely melodies, none lovelier than the melancholy andante solo violin line of No 3.

These buoyant performances by Ensemble 1700 Lund are more brightly coloured and transparently recorded than the somewhat sleepy-sounding modern instruments of the Helsingborgers and thus more successfully conjure the music’s sunny and friendly spirit. It is not known which movements were intended for which parts of the celebrations, by the way, though one can have fun guessing – royal bedding-down anyone? – but the joy of this graceful and affable music, and of this recording of it, is that it makes it so easy to imagine the chatter, smiles and courtesies of those long-ago summer days on the Drottningholm lawns.