This extremely well-filled SACD presents the heftiest of Mozart’s Salzburg serenades along with an associated march and the evergreen Musical Joke, with all its supposedly rib-ticklingly hilarious high jinks intact. The Haffner Serenade was composed in 1776 for the wedding of the daughter of one of the city’s noble families. This was clearly a sumptuous affair, with Mozart’s music lasting well over an hour, four movements of symphonic weight (some with violin solo, sweetly played here by Alexander Janiczek) separated by a serious of minuets and associated trios. Such serenades were often launched with a march that, while connected with the larger piece, was considered a separate entity; the stately K249 is known to have been conceived for performance alongside the Haffner.

The Musical Joke benefits from being played ‘straight’, by and large, and it’s always a peculiar delight to hear natural horns squawking away in the ‘wrong’ key. Forces are slimmed down here to the horns plus a string quartet with double bass replacing cello, giving a lightness of tread that differentiates this performance from inevitable memories of televised equestrian events. Nevertheless, it’s a work that perhaps repays only the most occasional hearing, for all the expertise of the performance on offer here.

It’s the Haffner music that provides the greatest rewards. With only the merest hint of string insecurity at the highest extreme of the range, Michael Alexander Willens and his players demonstrate their immersion in Mozart’s idiom, not least as co-conspirators over many years in Ronald Brautigam’s fortepiano survey of the keyboard concertos. This is a worthy follow-up to these musicians’ recording of the Posthorn Serenade (5/17), to which it presumably constitutes ‘Vol 2’, although it is not marked as such on the disc packaging.