These recordings were made in late April 2021, when Lars Vogt was already seriously ill with cancer. To be reviewing them just a few days before the anniversary of his death last year is moving indeed. So, too, is the interview in the booklet with his longtime producer Christoph Franke; there’s a debt of gratitude to Paul Lewis, too, whom Vogt enlisted as ‘a second pair of ears for critical listening’. It has to be said that, leaving the poignancy aside, the musical results speak for themselves and offer an illuminating last word to add to the extraordinary set of Schubert chamber works that Vogt made with the Tetzlaff siblings (4/23).

First impressions of the E flat major Concerto, K271, are of Vogt absolutely a man of the people, directing the Paris Chamber Orchestra, yet very much one of the gang. There’s an infectious sense of high spirits in the opening Allegro, allied to the radiance of Mozart in a major key. The ensemble, while not large in numbers, is big on impact, and in the cadenza Vogt is unafraid to draw out the shadows as well as the brilliance, though the movement closes in a mood of fizzing excitement.

This is a canny pairing of concertos, for of course Mozart turns to C minor for K271’s slow movement and in the hands of these musicians, the opening, with its imitative writing between muted violins against throbbing lower strings, sets the tone of unalloyed anguish. When the piano enters, Vogt imbues his line with an almost operatic quality, unafraid to pause within phrases to bring out heightened emotion, yet never at the expense of the narrative. The moment where Mozart switches from minor to major (3'34") has a moving emotional fragility to it, and as the Andantino draws to a close, the horns and oboes bring a potent rawness to the texture.

Darkness is dispelled by an airy finale, Vogt showing no strain through the bubbling Presto quavers, and there’s an irresistible opera buffa ish feel to it as the musicians present a compelling array of characters. This makes Mozart’s sudden mood shift to the passage marked Menuetto, cantabile (from 4'18") all the more potent, Vogt bringing to it a kind of courtly elegance with pizzicato strings forming a gossamer backdrop. As the tempo picks up once more, there’s a one-in-a-bar sweep, bringing the concerto to an uproarious close.

In the C minor Concerto, K491, Vogt chooses a similar tempo to Andsnes and the Mahler CO, the brass and timpani of the Paris CO more present and occasionally not quite as honed rhythmically. How movingly Vogt draws out the rare moments of consolation, such as the passage in E flat (from 3'23"), and how characterfully he is answered by the wind, led by bassoon. Vogt’s own first-movement cadenza takes as its starting point Mozart’s themes and pays affectionate homage to them, and there’s a lightness even through the final C minor arpeggios, Andsnes by contrast more overtly world-weary here.

All will be well, Vogt seems to say, in the gently smiling Larghetto, its theme taken at an easeful, flowing tempo. His credentials as an outstanding chamber musician are everywhere apparent, and there’s some particularly delectable play with the winds.

The theme for the variation-form finale is here etched in notably darker colours than some accounts, but it’s the reactivity of the musicians here, and their characterisation of the shifting moods, that is most striking, the turn to the major key for the wind-band march sounding anarchically out of place, the minor-key close strangely emotionally ambiguous.

Lars Vogt left behind only a handful of Mozart concertos, making this all the more precious.