Here, taken live from Munich in 1986, is Mozart played and conducted by music’s ultimate maverick. It was, after all, Friedrich Gulda who, after completing his Carnegie Hall Beethoven recitals, retired gratefully to New York’s Birdland jazz club, jamming away into the small hours. For him, classical music was dead, jazz the future of music, though his own brand of jazz pleased neither radicals nor conservatives. His attempt to rejuvenate what he considered a moribund art included a concert given in the nude and a ‘resurrection’ recital after his supposed death.

Such potted biography springs to mind when you observe Gulda with his strange hat and even stranger manner offering performances sufficiently po-faced to suggest contempt rather than affection for his chosen composer. It is almost as if colour, nuance and tonal variety would be an unwarrantable concession to an outmoded sentimentality. His first entry in Concerto No 20 is bleak and metronomic and his way with the supposedly festive, tirelessly virtuosic Coronation Concerto reduces its scintillating wit and charm to basic Czerny.

Much of this bears a passing resemblance to the no less perverse Mozart of Glenn Gould, Gulda’s near namesake, but both performances are greeted with a storm of cheers and bravos. Gulda was a figure treated with near reverence in Germany and in his native Austria, his transition from a pianist of immense early promise into a hard-bitten sophisticate politely ignored.

Curiously, and ever more enigmatically, Gulda scored his greatest success in French music, where he gave us so much more than mechanical expertise. Stylishly presented, this DVD is for aficionados only.