“Romantic Violin Concertos”: imperishable masterpieces by Mendelssohn, Tchaikovsky, Brahms and Bruch come instantly to mind. But this CD offers quite a different angle on the genre – to the extent that the one work most obviously meriting the simple designation “Romantic” isn’t actually a concerto.

Richard Wagner’s 1857 arrangement of “Träume”, one of his Wesendonck Lieder, is undoubtedly Romantic, and works well with a violin replacing the singer. His son Siegfried also had a vocal source in mind when deriving his own concerto from one of his many operas. By 1915, the concerto’s date, Siegfried Wagner was one of Germany’s more frequently performed composers; but while his operas have occasional flashes of genuine effectiveness, this post-Classical rather than Romantic concerto is devoid of merit. Its first “part” rambles monotonously in a limply lyric vein, while Part 2 – aspiring to something more dramatic, even demonic – sounds only like a cross between a discarded scherzo by Bruckner and an over-extended Strauss waltz.

There are no obvious echoes of Hans Pfitzner’s great operatic success Palestrina in his (very late-Romantic) 1924 Violin Concerto. Instead there is an abundance of quirkiness and unpredictability, riskily rhapsodic in the early stages but with enough shifts of character and direction to ensure a far from stodgy listening experience over its half-hour length. This positive effect is a tribute to Juraj Cizmarovic’s unaffectedly forthright solo playing and to the sterling support, in a forwardly balanced but characterful recording, of the WDR Orchestra under Markus Bosch.