Though all five of these violin concertos are youthful works dating from Mozart's late teenage years in Salzburg, they are attractive and characteristic pieces. It is usually said that he wrote at least four of them for Antonio Brunetti of the Salzburg Court Orchestra, but the late Professor Denis Matthews argued alternatively that his father (who was an authority on violin playing as well as a performer) may have encouraged him to compose them and then play them himself. We know that a few years later he had a poor opinion of ''that coarse and dirty Brunetti'' and thought him a disgrace to the orchestra which he now led; but whatever the case as to the intended recipient of these concertos, which certainly have a fair amount of Italianate sweetness to them, it seems likely that Mozart did play them, at least for his own pleasure, and the entirely unexpected, mock-martial 'Turkish' episode in the minuet-finale of K219 is undoubtedly the sort of vivid and witty music that he would have enjoyed writing and then performing.
That passage is very well done in this present issue, and indeed these are all stylish and assured performances of the concertos by Andrea Cappelletti, a young violinist who studied in Naples and whose later teachers include Tibor Varga and Sir Yehudi Menuhin. Playing a 1727 Stradivarius, he brings to these works a consistently sweet tone which is not only good to hear but is also surely more authentic in this music than a brilliantly projected 'modern' sound. But there is also plenty of attack where required, as in outer movements (listen, say, to the first solo entry in the G major Concerto), and the cadenzas have a fine richness and spaciousness even if they are, I feel, a touch larger than life for this music.
Thus there is much to praise here, and to sample Cappelletti at his most lyrically winning, try the Adagio of the B flat major Concerto, or indeed any of the slow movements, in which he shows a necessary capacity to think and feel in long lines, and to respond to the composer's cantabile marking in the Andante of K218. But equally fetching is his blend of dolcezza and joie de vivre in finales. The European Community Chamber Orchestra have already proved themselves as a skilful body of young musicians, and they provide attentive and sensitive support under a conductor whose name is new to me, Eivind Aaland. I hope it is not invidious to single out the horns, who do sterling and stylish work with some quite difficult writing. The ECCO sounds like a reasonably large body, but not too much so for the music, save in a few places such as the full-toned finale of the Second and Third Concertos, where it is the recording which makes the music sound over-rich, at least for those listeners who don't have the aural equivalent of a sweet tooth. In fact, it was made in a warmly reverberant English venue (a church, as is so often the case nowadays): but while it is undoubtedly too resonant and bassy to be ideal as sound, detail is not obscured and I found it acceptable enough while concluding that with less reverberation it would have been better still. But some movements definitely don't show this up as much as others, for example where the bass line is lighter, as in much of K218 and K219 on the second disc. Overall, this is a successful issue with some fine solo and orchestral playing, and I wish it well.'