Born on the Lithuanian fringes of Prussia in the same year as CPE Bach, brought up in what is now Latvia and trained in Copenhagen, Johan Daniel Berlin could have attracted the patriotic interest of three different modern-day countries in this, his anniversary year. As it is, his years as cathedral organist and leading musical light in Trondheim have here cast him as a Norwegian, as he has been in two previous recorded selections of his music by the Trondheim Chamber Orchestra (8/91) and the Trondheim Soloists. You get the picture.

The Oslo-based Norwegian Baroque Orchestra are the first period orchestra to give him a whole disc, and their brisk, stylish and clear-textured performances do him proud. They play four of his works, including two three-movement symphonies in brightly attractive Baroque-into-galant style with rather a nice line in ‘sentimental’ flute-coloured slow movements, and a Violin Concerto with a typically cheerful late-Baroque Italian manner expertly demonstrated by Gottfried von der Goltz. The fourth work is a kind of cornett concerto which for sheer oddness – the cornett was a long-obsolete instrument in Berlin’s day – must take some beating; the writing for it is rather trumpet-like, and it is good to hear it so nimbly negotiated by soloist Alexandra Opsahl, rendering the refuge of playing it on an actual trumpet unnecessary, in spite of the booklet’s bizarre claim that this is what has happened.

This snapshot is complemented by a symphony by Berlin’s son Johan Heinrich – a work inevitably in slightly later Classical style but no less pleasant to listen to – and by the inclusion in the artwork of illustrations of some of Johan Daniel’s many inventions. Had I not mentioned them?