Whatever you feel about the result, Philip Wilby’s reconstruction of the Double Concerto, KAnh56, is a significant attraction. He has put together a work Mozart began in 1778 but abandoned after 120 bars. It is scored for a big orchestra that excludes clarinets and, unusually, bassoons. Uncharacteristically, though, Norrington subdues the trumpets and timpani until he approaches the end. He also tends to treat the second violins as an accompanying murmuring line rather than an incisive force. But Norrington ‘improves’ on Wilby in the slow movement where he discerningly adds oboes to bars 59 and 60 (5’01”-5’07”) thus filling in bare areas.

Hope and Knauer have the requisite artistic rapport to deal with their interweaving parts and to draw out the jest in Mozart’s own cadenza to the finale, a 47-bar section in 4/4 within a movement that alternates between 2/4 and 6/8. They both come into their own in the Sonata, rightly treated as a work for piano and violin: Variation 5 of the slow movement exemplifies Knauer’s strongly voiced yet considerate playing and Hope’s ability to create expressive pizzicati as easily as he bows a singing sequence.

The D major Concerto, No 16, also for large band, is something of a Cinderella but here achieves the status it deserves. Now Norrington gives the players their head; ringing brass, militant drums and defined woodwind set their seal from the beginning. Nearly 60 years ago Arthur Hutchings deplored the ‘languor’ of the slow movement and thought the last ‘trivial’. Today he’d probably eat his words as Knauer (who plays Mozart’s cadenzas) and Norrington find no languor in an ideally paced Andantino, nor a trivial outlook in a deftly accented, dynamic finale that finishes in swinging compound time. This carefully balanced and tonally excellent disc is most desirable.