Twenty or so years down the line and Anne-Sophie Mutter’s Beethoven Concerto has cast off its youthful serenity in favour of a highly sophisticated aura that, while undeniably fascinating, seems to me at conspicuous odds with the spirit of the music.

True, Mutter’s earlier recording (under Karajan) wasn’t entirely without its novel effects: witness the seraphic aural halo that surrounded her filigree gestures at the start of the slow movement. But it did achieve a certain nobility. In this new recording one too often senses affectation being indulged merely for its own sake. Gramophone regulars will know that I have a fondness for old-style expressive devices, but Mutter’s ‘cool’ use of portamento is so out of style that at one or two points I half-expected Kurt Masur to dismiss the New York Phil and bring on a jazz trio instead.

But don’t take my word for it. Try the first movement’s sublime central section, from around 13'42", where Mutter employs smoky slides and all but suspends vibrato. The cadenza itself is wildly excitable though Fritz Kreisler’s triumphant merging of themes is so static, almost trance-like in fact, that it barely registers. I’m also not sure about the stunned re-entry of the second subject after the cadenza, an effect that’s recalled for the hushed first statement of the second subject of the slow movement (5'18" – it wafts in on the edge of another smoochy slide). But, to be fair, when Mutter returns to the same theme at 8'16", she greatly intensifies her tone, and by doing so lends a sort of retrospective logic to the earlier statement. That certainly works, and so do the unexpected embellishments earlier on in the movement, at around 2'59". The finale has plenty of swagger and enjoys a good deal of rhythmic freedom.

Kurt Masur cues a broad, warm and comparatively understated accompaniment, as if he’s merely standing by while Mutter toys with different sorts of dynamics, bowings, articulation, tone colouring and vibrato – sometimes gushing, sometimes sounding wan and withdrawn. She has an irksome habit of slowly accelerating her trills and tends to bend the line this way or that. All manner of tricks in fact, but to catalogue them in detail would be to lengthen this review out of all justifiable proportion. In any case, you will probably have got my drift by now. The two Romances work somewhat better – their musical agenda is, after all, far lighter than the Concerto – but again fussy mannerisms tend to get in the way.

Anne-Sophie Mutter is a formidable player capable of brilliant and often thoughtful interpretations, but on this occasion Beethoven’s Concerto is treated more as a vehicle for personalised gesturing than as a noble masterpiece in its own right. After three encounters, I had well and truly had enough.