Johann Wilhelm Wilms was born near Cologne in 1772. That’s just two years after Beethoven, and only 50 or so kilometres away. Both composers felt limited by their Rhineland surroundings; but whereas the elder man went south to Vienna, Wilms went north to Amsterdam. He enjoyed some success there – in 1815 one of his songs was chosen as the (former) Dutch national anthem – and appears to have become known as ‘the Dutch Beethoven’. His output includes symphonies and concertos for a range of instruments and a smattering of chamber music, some of which has made its way to disc.

Ronald Brautigam performs the first three (of five surviving) piano concertos. They bear out the description of Wilms’s music in Grove as being in an 18th-century style – Mozart and early Beethoven are the evident guiding spirits, although his themes perhaps inevitably lack those composers’ individuality. Wilms can sustain an argument nevertheless, and each of these works is a satisfying self-contained listening experience in itself. Brautigam’s instrument isn’t identified in the accompanying material but it’s a bright-sounding fortepiano that seems ideally suited to this music, sprinkled with an understated, integrated virtuosity but containing little to arouse the deeper emotions.

The latest of the three works, Op 26 in D (published in 1810), with its infectious polacca finale, appears to be the only one not previously recorded. The finest of the trio, however, is Op 12 in C (published in 1807), opening with a march-like Allegro, bedecked with trumpets and drums, that grows into a substantial movement of considerable subtlety that could conceivably have come from the pen of a Mozart. The central Poco adagio and graceful rondo finale, too, linger in the memory. None of this music is going to challenge Mozart and Beethoven but all of it, and the C major Concerto in particular, is worth revisiting, especially in such committed and sympathetic performances as these.