Mozart is widely held to have detested the flute, despite the fact that he wrote a whole opera about one and the instrument is such an integral colouring agent in nearly all his late music. More likely his antipathy was towards a flautist – one Ferdinand Dejean of Mannheim, an amateur player who commissioned a series of flute quartets from the 21-year-old composer and received two (K285 and 285a), while Mozart’s letters to his father back home in Salzburg dissemble about his progress on the works and the amount of money he received.

The other two quartets are now believed to date from around a decade later and to have no connection with the Mannheim quartets or Dejean. K298 contains quotations from popular Viennese songs of the mid-1780s, and K285b could be a compilation from Mozartian fragments with an arrangement (described by annotator Neal Zaslaw as ‘functional but not particularly imaginative’) of the variations from the Gran Partita, K361.

There’s plenty of fun to be had with this charming, undemanding music, as Lisa Friend and her Brodsky colleagues demonstrate. Perhaps, though, there’s more to be mined from them: Emmanuel Pahud deploys a wider dynamic range in his standard-setting 1999 recording, which is set in a more generous acoustic and calls on the talents of three star string players. Pahud’s articulation is also more acute, making his performances sound that touch more spruce than Friend and friends’. The older disc is currently only available to download, however, so the Chandos recording could be a useful stand-in in the meantime.