Here reaching its fourth volume, Jean Muller’s Mozart survey has been garnering warm praise for its sensitivity to the idiom, clarity of vision and evenness of technique. The latest instalment sandwiches one of Mozart’s most adventurous sonatas, the composite F major, K533/494 (the Rondo finale was written separately two years earlier), between two of his most beloved ones.

Certainly this is cultured and tasteful playing, with refined phrasing and voicing, and a fine sense of architecture. The Luxembourgeois pianist’s own minimalist yet effective notes reflect his intelligence and stylistic awareness. However, his approach does strike me as somewhat constrained, based as it is mainly on a single affect per movement, rather than contrast. Sometimes this uniformity even stretches across movements, as with the first two movements of the B flat major Sonata, K333 (aside from the eerily other worldly short episode in the second movement). It is almost like being in a room with the thermostat set comfortably but permanently between 18 and 19 degrees.

Compare, for example, with Pires’s mercurial timbral changes and shifts of temperament in the opening movement of the F major Sonata, or with the Horowitzian childlike playfulness and risk-taking edginess Hamelin brings to K333. Occasionally, as in the C major Sonata, K309, Muller allows himself greater margins for imagination and intervention. But even here there is a sense of calculation and over-awareness, as with the somewhat blatant agogic accent before the sudden harmonic changes in the finale, or the exaggerated emphasis on the second beat in the opening bars of the F major Sonata’s slow movement, almost as though he was reinstating a marking from old editions.

If you like your Mozart safe and middle-of-the-road, yet stylish and sufficiently subtle, Muller may be the answer to your prayers. If, like me, you value an extra degree of wit, grace, daring inventiveness and spontaneity, you need to look elsewhere.<