Frantisek Tuma (1704-74) was one of many 18th-century Czech musicians who became an honorary Viennese, employed as Kapellmeister to Count Kinsky and then as court composer and director of the dowager empress’s private chapel. In his enthusiastic if awkwardly translated note, Rinaldo Alessandrini rightly stresses the eclecticism of these string partitas, sonatas and sinfonias (c1740 the terms were virtually interchangeable), written on the cusp of the Baroque and the new galant style: “It is as if one were catapulted from a fugue by Bach to a Haydn Andante without any intermediate stage.”

Tuma honed his contrapuntal craft with the revered Johann Fux in Vienna, though, pace Alessandrini, his energetic fugal movements are far looser in construction than Bach’s. If they sound like anyone it’s Vivaldi. There’s a whiff of Handel in the songful Largo that opens the first of the two sinfonias (played, like all the music here, on single strings). One or two movements evoke early Haydn or (in the graceful Andante ma allegretto of the E minor Sonata) Pergolesi. At times, Baroque sequences and galant phraseology sit uneasily side by side. But Tuma’s is an intriguing, often faintly quirky voice, above all in the D minor Partita, with its wild, fantasia-like first movement (somewhere between Buxtehude and CPE Bach), its edgy minuet and its explosive final Presto.

Predictably, Alessandrini galvanises propulsive – often hyperactive – performances, with familiar slashing chords, scything accents and blunt phrase-endings. The close, in-your-face recording is all of a piece with the playing. Alessandrini can seem impatient with Tuma’s galant tendencies, but there’s no denying the enthusiasm and earthy energy of performances that should win new friends for this neglected Czech.