Eighty-four down, and still counting. Yet again Hyperion has colonised a corner of the Romantic repertoire that others have not even glimpsed. I confess I’d not until now heard of Aloys Schmitt (1788-1866). Admired first as a composer-virtuoso and later – not least by Liszt – as a pedagogue, Bavarian-born Schmitt moved between Munich, Berlin and Hanover before settling in Frankfurt. By 1830 his concert career was virtually over. After hearing him early the following year, the young Chopin noted that ‘Schmitt, a pianist from Frankfurt, had a rough reception although he is over 40 and composes 80-year-old music’.

That quote, from Jeremy Nicholas’s excellent booklet notes, implies that Schmitt’s piano music was already deemed old-fashioned by 1830. Robert Schumann, in a review of the Rondeau brillant, seems to have agreed. Probably composed between 1815 and 1825, both these concertos owe an obvious debt to Mozart (above all his D minor Concerto, K466), Beethoven and, in their pianistic glitter, Hummel. From the first movement of No 1 and the catchy finale of No 2 we can guess that Beethoven’s C minor Concerto, No 3, was a favourite of Schmitt’s. There’s nothing wildly original here, and little of Mozart’s and Beethoven’s close collusion between piano and orchestra. But Schmitt’s ideas, especially in the finales, are often diverting. There are impressively stormy gestures in the opening movements, and the lyrical melodies are suave and shapely. Beginning with a solo string quartet, the Adagio con moto of No 1 has a hymnlike solemnity redolent of late Haydn and early Beethoven.

No pianist today is more steeped in this idiom than Howard Shelley, who, true to form, dispatches both concertos with mingled flamboyance and limpid grace. Potentially routine passagework is sparklingly alive, while the cantabile melodies unfold with a vocal flexibility. Shelley is a master of rubato and artful timing. The chic opening of No 1’s finale and the waltzing second theme in the opening Allegro of No 2, given an echt Viennese lilt, make the point. Although violins can sound a bit thin above the stave, the Ulster Orchestra are assured, rhythmically alert partners. Shelley’s crystalline fingerwork duly dazzles in the delicate filigree of the Rondeau brillant, which begins as a polonaise and ends as a skittering galop: a work not to Schumann’s taste, evidently, but hard to resist in a performance of such style and verve.