Recent period-instrument performances from Giuliano Carmignola (Archiv, 9/08) and (in Nos 3-5) Andrew Manze (Harmonia Mundi, 5/06) have treated Mozart’s violin concertos as surrogate comic operas, relishing the young composer’s quicksilver contrasts and irreverent delight in the unexpected. Thomas Zehetmair is altogether more gracious and urbane in performances recorded over a five-year period at concerts in the Netherlands and Brazil. His tone is sweet and subtly varied, his phrasing always alive, with those tiny nuances more naturally achieved with the shorter, lighter Classical bow. Although nothing he does is dull or routine, what I miss in his playing is a crucial sense of coltish exuberance. In the opening movement of No 3, for instance, Mozart’s quickfire raillery between violin and orchestra never provokes a smile, as it does from the more roguish Carmignola and Manze. Here and elsewhere Zehetmair’s fondness for delicately tapered phrase endings and wistful piano echoes can become faintly enervating. Predictably, too, he rather civilises the rustic drone effects in the finales of Nos 3 and 4. And although he supplies his own, aptly brief, cadenzas, he is more cautious than Carmignola and, especially, Manze over ornamentation and improvised “lead-ins”.

In the slow movements Zehetmair combines aptly flowing tempi (Carmignola’s tend to be more flowing still) with great poetic eloquence and colouristic refinement. The idyllic Adagios of Nos 3 and 5 are ravishing in their way. Yet the overall effect is too exquisitely perfumed, at odds with the music’s essential Arcadian innocence. I enjoyed the darkly majestic Sinfonia concertante more, both for the characteristically vivid orchestral contribution and the sensitive interplay between violinist and the attractive, husky-toned viola of Ruth Killius. Phrasing tends to be more direct than in the solo concertos, to the music’s good. Other performances, including that by Carmignola and viola-player Danusha Was´kiewicz, have generated more passion in the modulating sequences of the first-movement development (almost delicately dispatched in the new recording), and in the C minor Andante, here gently elegiac rather than tragic. But this intelligent, thoroughly musical account has its own raison d’être.

The engineers have secured reasonably consistent sound and balance from the various venues, though the basses can be overprominent, distractingly so in the slow movements of Nos 3 and 4. There is certainly plenty to enjoy here if you value grace and refinement above wit and roguish ebullience.