Etienne-Nicolas Méhul (1763-1817) was perhaps the most important opera composer in France in the period before Berlioz, as well as being no mean symphonist. A couple of arias and overtures were in the repertoires of musicians such as McCormack, Tauber and Beecham; two or three operas have made it to disc. (Look out for Ediciones Singulares’s recording of Adrien, made available as a download last year.) And there are many moments of high drama and acute orchestral wizardry in operas such as Ariodant and Uthal, which are yet to see the light of day on record.

And what of his symphonies? It was the performance of music such as this in Vienna in the very early 19th century that Beethoven heard, imbuing his own music with that epic post-Revolutionary fervour that is so much a part of his ‘middle period’. Is Méhul the ‘French Beethoven’? There are certainly moments where you think you might be hearing a draft Beethoven later discarded; and Méhul’s music certainly has a similar irresistible impetus, a recognisable harmonic adventurousness and even, as revealed by repeated listening, a memorability shared by the German composer. What it lacks, perhaps, is that sense of grim inevitability that Beethoven’s great works manage to distil, or the willingness to vary a motif so that its repetition doesn’t become wearing. Missing, too, is the lyricism that provides such necessary dramatic contrast in the younger man’s instrumental works.

The new period band Kapella 19 devote their debut disc to Méhul’s Third and Fourth Symphonies, along with the only surviving movement of a fifth (tantalising for its wholescale cribbing of Haydn’s Drumroll Symphony!). Listeners who know this music from Michel Swierczewski’s 1980s Gulbenkian recordings will be surprised by how much more Eric Juteau finds in it, played with a dramatic drive and dynamic explosiveness that eluded the Lisbon musicians. Kapella 19’s production team, too, capture a far more vivid sound picture than Nimbus’s engineers in a similarly generous acoustic. If these Nuremberg-based players complete the cycle – and perhaps if they are picked up by a major label – this could be the Méhul symphony survey that sets the standard.