‘Youthful music of yearning…imbued with an innocent utopianism, a faith in perfectability, beauty, and sensual fulfilment’ was Mozart biographer Maynard Solomon’s verdict on the five violin concertos. To which I would add a coltish delight in the novel and unexpected – a side of the teenage Mozart’s persona vividly realised by Andrew Manze (Harmonia Mundi) and Pekka Kuusisto (Ondine) in Nos 3 5, and Giuliano Carmignola (Archiv) in the complete concertos. Technically superb, the American violinist Rachel Barton Pine is relatively cool and contained: fair enough, though for all the poise and precision of her playing, I rather missed a sense of impish, opera buffa collusion between soloist and orchestra in movements such as the finales of Nos 1 and 3. That said, there is much to enjoy in Barton Pine’s sensitive, finely honed performances, especially of Nos 4 and 5 (plenty of temperament in the latter’s ‘Turkish’ eruption). With a nod to period performance, she articulates crisply and uses vibrato modestly. Marriner, who must have conducted more Mozart than anyone alive, and the ASMF are urbanely attentive in support – though oboes and (especially) horns are too discreetly blended into the tutti sonorities for my taste.

In the Elysian slow movements of Nos 3 5 Barton Pine draws a pure, chaste line and shades her phrases gracefully. Other violinists, including Manze and James Ehnes (CBC), have found more of Maynard Solomon’s yearning and ‘sensual fulfilment’ in this music. But Barton Pine’s straighter approach is never less than affecting. She is imaginative in her improvised lead-ins and provides her own cadenzas, more musing than showy, with inventive touches like the anticipation of the finale’s bagpipe drones in the first-movement cadenza of No 3. In the Sinfonia concertante, the greatest instrumental work Mozart produced before he decamped to Vienna, Barton Pine is well matched by the confident, full-toned viola of Matthew Lipman. This is another strong, direct performance, with Marriner ever alert to the music’s darkly glowing sonorities. If the players, characteristically, stress elegance over exuberance in the contredanse finale, the C minor Andante is eloquent without Romantic exaggeration, its sorrowful phrases beautifully dovetailed by the soloists.