One might expect Andrew Manze's interpretations of Johannes Brahms' four symphonies to adhere to ideas of the movement for historically informed performance practice, due to his scholarship and dedication to authenticity in his early music performances. However, and somewhat paradoxically, he and the Helsingborg Symphony Orchestra have delivered more or less mainstream readings on modern instruments; there are no signs of late 19th century woodwind or brass timbres, and the strings play with standard vibrato. Yet Manze's historical fact finding has gone to a deeper level than just replicating instrumentation or orchestral scale, and he has found numerous clues to Brahms' intentions in the composer's transcriptions of the symphonies for two pianos, which often vary with the published orchestral scores in accentuation, tempo indications, and phrasing. These are fine points that can be discerned with careful listening and great familiarity with many other recordings of the symphonies, both conventional and historic, but they may not be the main thing listeners will consider in appreciating this set. The playing and the recording quality are up to the extraordinarily high levels set by CPO in all its releases, and these resilient works sound as good as they ever did under any other conductor.

Volume 57 in Hyperion’s Romantic Piano Concerto series turns up another ‘discovery’: the music of Swedish composer Adolf Wiklund. These little-known but lusciously tuneful works are characterized by big-boned, symphonic gestures reminiscent of Rachmaninov, yet tempered with the Nordic clarity of Grieg. Wiklund’s two piano concertos are central to his output, and in fact they enjoyed considerable popularity in Sweden until as recently as fifty years ago, when modernist sensibilities deemed them unfashionable.

These two splendid concertos by Stenhammar are offered together on one CD for the first time. The original orchestration of Stenhammar's first concerto was long thought to be lost when the offices of the publisher were bombed during the second world war. However, in 1983 a copy of the original was found in the Library of Congress and this version is featured here. The twenty-two year old's opus one is a masterpiece. Majestic and virtuosic at its opening, the work explores a world of Nordic mystery in the third movement and ends with music of sad, reflective sweetness. The second concerto is a distinctly different work, with a novel structure and a steady tension between soloist and orchestra that is only resolved in the virtuosic finale.

Composed for the 1744 celebrations at Drottningholm Palace of the marriage between the Swedish crown prince Adolf Fredrik and Lovisa Ulrika of Prussia, Johan Helmich Roman's Drottningholm Music is a key work in Swedish art music. Consisting of 24 individual movements, it forms an inventory of short pieces suitable for providing the proper musical ambience for the royal celebrations, which took place over four days. As befitted the occasion, the character of the music is buoyant and witty, and when the atmosphere occasionally veers away from the carefree, it is towards a graceful melancholy rather than grief or pain. This also conforms to the spirit of the time, as does the style of the music itself: varied and brimming with ideas, but never weighed down by dry learnedness or disproportionate displays of emotion. Roman had spent formative years in London in the 1710s, and in the 1730s made a long journey throughout Europe, absorbing the new, ‘galant' currents in music. Although by 1744 he was suffering from failing health, he was at his peak as a composer, and in this sparkling and joyful music he demonstrates both his innate talent and the impressions gathered from music by composers such as Sammartini and Leonardo Leo.