Piano-accompanied performances of all of Mozart’s violin sonatas are surprisingly few and far between. Most duos – perhaps wisely – restrict themselves to the works of the composer’s adulthood, from K296 onwards. The reason is simple: the earliest works, especially when listened to one after the other, offer little interest beyond the fact of their being the work of a child aged between six and eight. ‘Complete’, though, needs further qualification, still more the booklet note’s claim of ‘presenting every single piece Mozart wrote for violin and piano’. Two sets of variations (K359 and 360) are absent, as are the hybrid sonatas K10 15 (published in London in 1765 as Op III), designated for flute or violin and keyboard with optional cello. So we have the works of the infant Mozart: K6 9, published in Paris in 1763 as Opp I and II, plus the barely more advanced K26 31 (Op IV, The Hague and Amsterdam, 1766). Then there are the mature works, written during Mozart’s early and mid-twenties, and the four late sonatas, composed in Vienna during the 1780s. Additionally there are a handful of fragments, some of them canonical (K402 404), a couple in completions undertaken after Mozart’s death by Maximilian Stadler but others left tantalisingly unrealised.

These performances were given as a series of six concerts for WSHU Public Radio, based on the campus of Sacred Heart University in Connecticut. The Broadcast Center appears to be a modern, low-ceilinged building, which, along with fairly close miking, limits the dynamic and colouristic spectrum of the violin, although as the works become more ambitious and thickly voiced, the mics seem to move out a touch. Nevertheless, when compared with similar projects such as Alina Ibragimova’s survey, the slightly constricted sound picture to some extent obscures the range of attacks and addresses Andrew Smith has in his technical arsenal.

The mature sonatas, too, boast a greater range of expressive devices in these readings than the earlier ones (and the sketches), presumably because they have been more central to Smith’s career as a violinist. These players seem happiest when there is lots to do: in passages such as the busy development of K306’s opening Allegro con spirito or the main Allegro of K454. Elsewhere, in a balance that somewhat favours the violin over the piano, Smith’s repeated accompanimental passagework can occasionally become a touch over-insistent.

In general, these are valiant rather than revelatory performances. For those who, say, wished to make a first acquaintance with these works, the comprehensiveness, compact dimensions and price-point of this six-disc collection may well appeal, although it presents no real challenge to Ibragimova’s set, beautifully performed and thoughtfully programmed over five two-disc sets but yet to be made available in a single box.