Michael Schneider’s period instrument group La Stagione Frankfurt has been in business for 18 years, but it has never given a UK concert before. Hence perhaps the timid numbers at Saturday’s Mozart and Haydn parade in the Lufthansa Festival of Baroque Music. Post-Baroque in this case.

Schneider’s conducting, right from the start, never shrank in a corner. Hips swivelling, hands chopping, arms flung wide: you’d have thought he was piloting some mighty masterwork, not a tugboat such as Mozart’s D major symphony, K 133 — early and inconsequential. Maybe the teenage Wolfgang picked blithe nothings for themes just to display his alchemical gifts. Maybe La Stagione did something similar. We certainly enjoyed their transparent playing, the limpid flute and the supple strings.

Would we be offered anything more? The answer came with the tenor Christoph Prégardien, and it was not encouraging. With its lashings of torment and writhing notes, Fuor del mar from Mozart’s Idomeneo should be a gift for any singer; yet Prégardien’s tenor — tending towards a lyric baritone — stayed maddeningly close to stolid. His voice is not blessed with much individual colour (not his fault), but he could have done more to penetrate the words, and make the top notes seem part of a process, less a sudden shout of “Eureka!” The storytelling went haywire too in the aria from Haydn’s L’anima del filosofo. Here the composer played a part; how could this Orpheus feel Hell in his heart yet sing such cheerful music? In Prégardien’s last appearance as the despairing lover in Mozart’s recitative and aria Misero! o sogno . . . Aura, che intorno spiri, music, words and delivery happily started to fuse. I wish this had happened earlier.

Back in the spotlight, La Stagione displayed moderate vim in the mature Mozart of the Prague symphony, capped with its scatterbrained finale. The well-balanced sound was pleasant, as before; but somewhere en route from Frankfurt the players had mislaid the imagination and zip to take this concert to a higher level. Come back again — with a better programme.