Perhaps with the hindsight that this was to be Mozart’s last major completed work, most players stress the Clarinet Concerto’s regretful, autumnal tints. Not so Fabio Di Càsola. In the serene outer sections of the Adagio he spins the purest, most liquid of lines. But I can’t recall a more urgent and impassioned performance of the first movement, or one that draws on a bolder palette of colours. Even without the oily low notes available on a basset clarinet (Di Càsola plays the concerto in the traditional, transcribed version for a normal clarinet), he makes the central development uncommonly disquieting. Conversely, the finale is as gamesome as you will hear, with waggishly inventive phrasing and a delightful, operatic collusion between soloist and orchestra. Yet Di Càsola is also acutely responsive to the moments of doubt and wistfulness – above all in the recapitulation – that throw the prevailing merriment into higher relief. Douglas Boyd draws finely detailed playing from the excellent Winterthur band (modern instruments except for natural horns), though I wish he had divided his violins left and right.

The two Parisian works – the D major Symphony that caused a sensation at its 1778 premiere and the E flat Sinfonia concertante of dubious authenticity – are enjoyable too, even if the four concertante soloists are too forwardly recorded and sometimes too loud. Boyd presses the tempo rather rigidly in the symphony’s pastoral 6/8 Andante, which emerges short on grace and poetry. But the outer movements have a splendid ceremonial swagger (the opening Allegro truly assai, as Mozart requests), with horns and trumpets ringing out proudly in the first-movement recapitulation. In sum, an engaging, expertly played Mozart anthology, recommended above all for Di Càsola’s passionate and dramatic view of the Clarinet Concerto.