You could never accuse Daniel Hope of going for the obvious. Rather than record yet another album of Mozart concertos, he presents the ever-popular G major Concerto, No 3, in the context of Mozart’s predecessors and contemporaries: ‘a reflection of the Age as I see and hear it’, as he puts it in the booklet. Some of Hope’s choices may raise an eyebrow. The curmudgeon in me questioned his inclusion of Haydn’s G major Concerto, whose authenticity is debated – not that this worries the note writer, who confidently ascribes it to Haydn with the date 1768. Nor was I taken by the arrangement of Gluck’s Dance of the Blessed Spirits, whose remote, otherworldly flute solo becomes altogether too human and ‘present’ on the violin, even when played as sensitively as here. But Hope’s other left-field choices – the gently melancholy Larghetto from a concerto by Mozart’s Bohemian friend Josef Mysliveček, and Johann Peter Salomon’s Romance – are charmers, while the souped-up Rondo alla turca, with harpsichord as surrogate percussion, is good, lusty fun.

Abetted by the polished Zurich Chamber Orchestra, whose accompaniments are always lithe and buoyant, Hope brings abundant character and colour to all the music here. Occasionally – I’m thinking especially of the opening Allegro of the Mozart concerto – his penchant for minute shadings and nuances can seem over-sophisticated. But with his questing imagination and a tonal palette that ranges from the smoky to the seraphically sweet, everything sounds fresh and spontaneous. Mozart’s adagios both sing and speak, with phrases newly imagined when they recur; and here and elsewhere he makes discreet, expressive use of portamento, crucial to an 18th-century violinist’s armoury. In the Haydn, if it is indeed by him, Hope exploits the rich, throaty resonance of his G string in the first movement (where his cadenza slyly quotes the famous C major Cello Concerto), and spins a chaste cantabile line in the Adagio. It hardly needs adding that he is in his element in the Haydn and Mozart finales, dispatched with verve, delicacy and an irreverent twinkle in the eye.