The four Mozart-Grieg Sonatas have garnered more opprobrium than affection over the years but they still pop up occasionally. This release has the bonus, if that’s the right word, of including the Fantasy in C minor, K475. Just so you know, I sit firmly on the cui bono? side of the fence, still wondering why Grieg, while admittedly going through the creative doldrums in 1877, didn’t have anything better to do. For those not familiar with Grieg’s arrangements, he leaves the original Mozart sonata intact for piano 1 while piano 2 plays his own countermelodies, canonic imitations and other devices using late-19th-century harmonic language. Sometimes this is done subtly and sensitively – if you know the sonatas you might even think it a clever and amusing exercise to hear Mozart Norwegianised – but too often it sounds, though obviously not intentional, as if Grieg is taking the mickey. Julie Adam and Daniel Herscovitch play charmingly and are well recorded, the latter a shade less discreet than the former when playing the Grieg part.

For more home-entertainment versions of Mozart – and surely of greater musical value – are the three anonymous early-19th-century arrangements for strings of the Sinfonia concertante, Clarinet Quintet and Horn Quintet. K364 as a string sextet sounds like bona fide Mozart, with the original violin and viola solo parts ingeniously shared out among the players to produce a genuine chamber music work (only the second cello maintaining the bass-line is excluded from this process). One inevitably misses the alluring tone of the clarinet in K581 but the playing of the honey-toned Australia Ensemble is highly persuasive (the lovely Larghetto movement remains as beguiling as ever). The cello takes the horn part in K407, convincingly so, and one’s only quibble about this recording is the uniform texture of this second CD.