No angularities or vertically oriented sounds here. Instead, the capacity of the modern piano for a horizontally sustained line is largely to the fore, heard through Christian Blackshaw’s lucid touch, command of tone through dynamics and tactful use of pedal. His technique is unimpeachable, his concept of the music often gentle, sometimes contemplative, occasionally detached or assertive. Most of these attributes surface in the opening sonata, K281, its first-movement line sustained, phrases gracefully ordered. But the finale is episodic, its outbursts evened out; and the slow movement, rather fast for andante, is also far from amoroso.

Impersonality tells in other movements too – the Minuets of K282, the Andante of K283 and the first-movement Allegro moderato of K330 understated to the point of limpness. Yet Blackshaw responds with emotional fervour to the Adagio of K282, melancholy and inward, its structure strongly held together through both repeats. Reach the last work, K333, to hear him fully committed to a just interpretation.

Absent throughout is the sense of the demonic in Mozart, detected by Hermann Abert, whose rationale was published posthumously in Walter Cobbett’s Cyclopaedic Survey of Chamber Music in 1929. Cobbett himself warned readers that Abert’s concept would be daunting. But he has been vindicated by pianists such as Daniel-Ben Pienaar and Maria-João Pires, and the fortepianist Kristian Bezuidenhout. Their performances uncover a much wider range of subjective opportunities within this music that Blackshaw (and many others) have chosen not to consider.