Kuhlau was not the luckiest man on earth. He lost an eye in childhood, had to escape over the border from Hamburg to Copenhagen to avoid conscription (despite being half-blind), while a fire caused a serious chest infection from which he never recovered, dying at 45 (and also destroyed his second piano concerto). In the interim, though, Denmark adopted him as its own and he enjoyed a successful career as a composer/pianist. His Op 7 Concerto, written in 1811, is a fascinating one-off in the history of the piano concerto and Marianna Shirinyan has come up with a neat piece of programming, coupling it with Beethoven’s First, on which it’s unashamedly modelled. Bad news for Kuhlau, you might surmise, but not a bit of it. It’s as if he has taken the shell of the work, scooped out its innards and given it a completely new filling.

Kuhlau begins with a motto markedly similar to the one that opens Beethoven’s concerto, following it with a similarly extended orchestral tutti before allowing the piano to take centre stage, just as Beethoven does, with a solo passage. Much of the effect of his writing lies in the dramatic contrasts of dynamic and texture, and Shirinyan understands this well, bringing greater vivacity to the virtuoso passagework than Amalie Malling on Chandos. The slow movement (in A flat, like Beethoven’s) is striking for its harmonic adventurousness and its presaging of Chopin in some of its turns of phrase. Shirinyan and Gupta choose a flowing tempo that is arguably more telling than Malling’s rapt approach. Admittedly, Shirinyan isn’t blessed with the most beautiful of instruments and some of the duetting with the wind could be more characterful but she makes a very strong case for this surprisingly unsung piece. The finale, with its abrupt changes of direction, sounds for all the world like Haydn shifted forwards half a century. Could its humorous harmonic swerves have been played up even more? Possibly; but the dynamic extremes are well captured by pianist and orchestra.

As for the Beethoven, it can’t really compete with Andsnes’s recent recording with the Mahler CO, not least for the intricate interplay of soloist and ensemble. But Shirinyan’s energy and the clarity of her fingerwork are infectious none the less.