The opus number, like the booklet-note, is misleading: dating from two years before Mendelssohn’s final, anguished Quartet, Op 80, the late String Quintet carries no specifically personal intimations of mortality. The case for upscaling it is no more immediately compelling than it was for Brahms’s Op 51 No 1 Quartet but the playing of Camerata Bern (no less than that of the Amsterdam Sinfonietta in the Brahms – Channel Classics, 9/11) contrives an apt gravity for the third-movement funeral march without much spoiling the athletic grace of the quick movements. The booklet doesn’t say who made the arrangement: had the composer done it, I dare say he would have added winds, as he did when orchestrating the Scherzo of his Octet, though they would bring plangent rather than piquant colour to the Andante scherzando of the Quintet, where Camerata Bern take only a little more time than their “true” chamber music rivals but to much more pensive effect.

Indeed, it’s the extra wind (and timpani) parts that make the Quintet’s companion on this disc the principal draw – a genuinely valuable first recording – for they are Mendelssohn’s own, apparently written for a public performance of the Concerto some time shortly after the private Sunday afternoon affair in May 1823, when he was all of 14. They throw quite a new light on the concerto, of distinctly Mozartian tint – particularly and inevitably the minor-key piano concertos, K466 and K491. I like the performance a great deal, too: Antje Weithaas’s springy turn of phrase and deft portamento, the ideal recorded balance between her and her colleagues, the palpable sense that everyone present is meeting the concerto’s Emperor-like scale and finding more than bathetically youthful jeu d’esprit.