Karl von Ordonez (or Carlo d’Ordoñez, among various spellings; 1734‑86) was a member of the minor Spanish nobility but spent his life in Vienna, enjoying a career as a Habsburg civil servant. That he was nothing more than a dilettante composer makes it astonishing that he wrote so much, including more than 70 symphonies, a representative quartet of which is recorded here.

These are putatively dated during the 1760s and ’70s, although the F minor might be from as early as the 1750s; its austerity could be thought to link it to the Sturm und Drang of the following decade but it wastes no time in turning to lyrical A flat and its three-movement form suggests the earlier date. The Symphony in C has a wonderful second subject for oboes and horns, which return in the finale for some antiphonal fanfares, but here the music doesn’t seem to be completely ‘under the fingers’ and one wonders what a Freiburg Baroque Orchestra or Berlin Akademie might make of it. Horns are also to the fore in the B flat Symphony that opens the disc: a work that revels more in galant sound effects than in anything approaching a melody. The disc closes with a seven-movement D major work, which Ordoñez (although not the CD documentation) called Sinfonia solenna; scholars suggest this might have been used in a liturgical context, and if you squint you might just be able to make out glosses on the Kyrie, Gloria and ‘Et incarnatus est’, for example. There’s also a violin solo, the one misfire on the disc, which surely should have been retaken to avoid some stomach-turning intonation.

Ordoñez was clearly not among the first rank of musicians of his day – even Grove draws attention to some unimaginative, not to say deficient modulatory passages. Nevertheless, he was among those who guided the development of the Viennese Classical style in its early days and there is much pleasure to be had in discovering his music.