Giovanni Giornovich (1747-1804) was perhaps born at sea, definitely baptised in Palermo, probably held a French passport and certainly appeared as an admired travelling violin virtuoso in most of Europe’s concert-loving cities, including London (where he was a soloist in Haydn’s first concert in 1791). When Bojan Čičić was growing up in Zagreb, he was told that Giornovich was Croatia’s ‘very own Mozart’, although in fact it is only his surname that links him to a country he seemingly never set foot in. But if that is what inspired Čičić to get this recording together, we should be grateful, for these three concertos from around 1790, while hardly matching Mozart’s standards, are good examples of the kind of attractive orchestral fare that entertained the audiences of the day – fluent, balanced, pleasingly melodic, if not memorably so, and filled with athletic but well-turned virtuosity.

Stylistically they are conventional, even though Giornovich makes a few mild structural experiments; the Romance-style slow movement is apparently his invention. No 13 ends on a tonic chord but leaves the violin holding the fifth, an oddly inconclusive moment that was perhaps intended as a launching pad for solo improvisation – an encore without waiting for the audience to applaud, as it were. Čičić places one of Giornovich’s airs and variations here, a move that really gives you a whiff of the atmosphere of the Classical-period concert hall. And indeed that glimpse of a lost performing world and its forgotten music is the main appeal of this CD as a whole. Concerto No 14 is stocked with Russian tunes, guaranteed to stir curiosity among its listeners.

Čičić is a clean and assured soloist, well on top of the technical, often high-lying writing Giornovich puts his way. The tone of his period violin will sound thin to people used to modern-instrument Beethoven Romances, but it doesn’t take long to adjust. The Illyria Consort is a small orchestra without sounding particularly so on this recording, but the location, a church in Summertown, Oxford, is vulnerable to outside traffic noise, making some of the edits conspicuous. Still, this disc is well worth hearing, especially for fans of the Classical period.