For a composer of some of the most easy-going music in history, Carl Millöcker appears to have been a tricky customer. He was fired from the Theater an der Wien for quarrelling with both singers and orchestra only three months after being appointed a conductor there in the spring of 1866. That autumn he moved to the Harmony Theatre, falling on his sword the following year after a major scrap with a singer.

If you wouldn’t detect an irksome personality from Millöcker’s free-flowing music, what you can trace is his musical provenance as a flautist. In the ‘French polka’ Ida he spins a long and delicious line from a small, uneventful musical germ. His themes are often similarly tender but also indistinct, with the possible exception of one of the four waltz themes that breaks out of The Sunday Child Waltz, based on themes from the operetta of the same name.

Otherwise, it’s easy to hear how Millöcker became one of the central figures of the Viennese operetta scene (he eventually got his job at the Theater an der Wien back) but remains largely forgotten today: he knew how to write ‘by numbers’. Listening to him dip into his box of tricks across 13 tracks for a whole hour is an odd experience, especially given the relative textural heaviness of much of this light music.

But it does have a sense of charm in the right hands. We know that playing a waltz isn’t easy (Vladimir Jurowski once said that the hardest opera he took charge of at Glyndebourne was Die Fledermaus) and there are occasions on which that very idiosyncratic counting required seems to elude this German orchestra. At least they sound like they’re having fun under Christian Simonis.