‘Sonatas for keyboard with violin accompaniment’, we are always reminded, and in performances on instruments of the period (or very nearly so), that rubric is made manifest. The two earlier sonatas here make great play of having the two instruments take turns in the spotlight, and K378 opens with the violin playing an accompanimental figure while the piano holds the melodic interest. The two instruments on this recording are constrained in their dynamic range and thus match each other uncannily. Another dividend is that a true pianissimo is a real possibility, and exploited wherever appropriate.

Sayaka Shoji’s violin is a c1729 Strad yclept ‘Récamier’, while Gianluca Cascioli plays a beautiful Paul McNulty copy of a Viennese Walter from c1805 – slightly late for Mozart, perhaps, but well within the scale he would have known: a little less insistent than the sound we know from the composer’s own Walter, as played by Robert Levin on his set of the keyboard sonatas (ECM, 11/22). Shoji’s silvery tone matches the keyboard well, 18th-century bowing techniques enabling her to echo the slightly blunt decay of the piano.

The great B flat Sonata, K454, of 1784 is conceived on a different scale from the two earlier works: this is Viennese concert music for a visiting virtuoso rather than domestic music published for the consumption of (gifted) amateurs. Accordingly, Shoji’s tone opens out to meet the fresh challenges of the work, not only in the extrovert outer movements but in a central Andante of touchingly unaffected poise.

Both players richly embellish repeats, and Cascioli even provides little Eingänge into recapitulations in K301. This album joins a rapidly growing catalogue of period-instrument Mozart violin sonatas, the three volumes by Isabelle Faust and Alexander Melnikov among the most recent. Shoji and Cascioli perform within a more intimate acoustic than Faust and Melnikov, as befits the internality and close rapport evident in their conceptions of this wonderful music.