With his high collars and long flowing hair, the Robert Radecke who gazes out from the back of the booklet looks every inch the young German Romantic. The booklet-notes fill in the background. Radecke was born in Silesia in 1830 and held various conducting posts in Imperial Berlin. A youthful disciple of Schumann, he came to number Max Bruch and Joseph Joachim among his friends. You get the picture.

And on the strength of this recording, his music is much as you’d expect from a gifted professional musician working in that milieu. It’s fluent, with occasional moments of poetry. I’m trying hard to avoid the term ‘well-crafted’, but there isn’t really much more than can be said about his overture King John. And although the first movement of his F major Symphony (1877) was apparently inspired by the scenery of Switzerland, it makes only a mild impression, in a pleasantly lyrical way.

Radecke seems to have been more at ease in less complex forms: the symphony’s Scherzo sets a Mendelssohn-like lightness against a surprising surge of passion in the central Trio section. The two orchestral Scherzos Op 52 (1888) explore that vein of fantasy more fully, with echoes of Brahms and – in the first – a curious pre-echo of Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique. A Nachtstück dedicated to Joachim is effectively a full-scale symphonic movement, and in its outer sections Radecke manages to generate a real atmosphere of nocturnal solemnity.

The Sinfonie Orchester Biel Solothurn doesn’t have the most luxurious tone in the world, and CPO’s recording gives a slight predominance to the wind and brass, exposing occasional wobbles of ensemble and intonation. But overall, under its music director Kaspar Zehnder, the orchestra gives alert, musicianly performances, making this probably the only disc of Radecke’s orchestral music that you’ll ever need