The first instalments of this ‘Next Generation Mozart Soloists’ project, sponsored by the Orpheum Foundation of Switzerland, showcased ‘six big musical personalities … exploiting all the opportunities for youthful impetuosity and display that this (predominantly) youthful music has to offer’, as I reported in last year’s May issue. The third volume continues in the same vein, while the fourth departs from the formula, presenting a single soloist in a pair of piano concertos from Mozart’s Vienna decade – music in which he graduated from his early brilliance to mature transcendence.

Vol 3 again features three young musicians ranging in age from 19 to 28. The best-known of this trio – at least so far as British listeners are concerned – is Jeneba Kanneh-Mason, fifth of the seven children of this remarkable musical family, who turns in a tidy reading of the B flat Piano Concerto of 1776 that wants only the last ounce of projection of the soloist’s personality. The French flautist Joséphine Olech (our One to Watch in May 2021) locates the playfulness in the G major Concerto’s faster music and plenty of rich tone in the central Adagio. Perhaps the most memorable performance, though, comes from the Norwegian violinist Ludvig Gudim in K218, displaying a high degree of technical mastery and beautifully clear and consistent tone in a wholly satisfying reading of this well-worn standard.

A similar fusion of technical mastery and sympathy for 18th-century style is also a hallmark of Julian Trevelyan’s coupling of the A major and C minor Piano Concertos of 1786. Decoration is added imaginatively, if perhaps a little to busily for some (for example in the later stages of the Adagio of K488). Trevelyan is let down, though, by the rather workaday accompaniment of the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra – a far cry from the vivid and dynamic playing conductor Christian Zacharias drew from the Bavarian RSO for Jan Lisiecki in a different coupling of Mozart concertos (DG, 9/12). The result is a pair of performances that only just fail to spring fully to life, especially when compared with the superfine inspiration and responsiveness of Leif Ove Andsnes in the same two concertos (Sony, 5/22). It’s a shame: musicianship of the standard achieved by this 24-year-old pianist deserves better.