The choristers of New College, Oxford, ranging in age from nine to 13, ‘cheerfully state the obvious truth that we elders hesitate to utter,’ says their director of music, Edward Higginbottom, ‘that Mozart is cool, clever, totally engaging, and the best’. Their offering, the latest in the current (and welcome) mini-boom in recordings of Mozart’s Salzburg church music, contains two rarely heard works: the second of his two settings of the Litaniae Lauretanae (1774) and the Vesperae de Domenica (1779). The earlier work consists of a Kyrie and Agnus Dei framing a sequence of petitions to the Virgin and takes, by and large, a relaxed, pastoral approach to the Marian text, breaking out into something slightly more fierce at the central ‘Salus infirmorum’. If it’s not Mozart’s most memorable work, it demonstrates the teenager’s innate craftsmanship and taste, and is presented with utmost confidence and charisma by the New College Choir, lusty and open-throated in attack and fully demonstrating their appreciation of this music. The onus falls largely on the superb treble soloist, Inigo Jones, who exudes confidence and is unfazed by Mozart’s tricky vocal writing; he is matched by the boy alto Michael Alchin and two choral scholars.

The Vespers for an unidentified Sunday (possibly Pentecost) are not as well known or as stylistically wide-ranging as Mozart’s slightly later setting of the same psalms (Solemn Vespers, K339): the Baroque ish angularity of the ‘Laudate pueri’ is here replaced by rolling counterpoint in what the 18th century erroneously termed the ‘Palestrina style’; the ‘Laudate Dominum’ presents a treble aria with organ obbligato but doesn’t boast the to-die-for melody of the K339 setting. In between the two choral works comes an Epistle sonata, one of those joyful oddities of Mozart’s output that stand out rather like a runcible spoon, or Rutland. This performance, however, doesn’t quite display the explosive vim of Peter Neumann’s reading (EMI – nla), which once formed an instrumental oasis in his recording of the Coronation Mass.

Claudio Abbado, too, rediscovered some early Mozart, in this case the very earliest of his Masses, written on the grandest scale when the composer was only 12 (presumably with some help from his father). There’s much to be enjoyed in this remarkable work, not least the ‘Crucifixus’, where muted trumpets and drums – a sound unique, I think, in Mozart – snarl out their deathly tattoo. In this and a similarly scaled work from the opposite end of the Viennese Classical era, Schubert’s trombone-imbued E flat Mass, the presentation is suave and refined, the camerawork standard for this style of concert performance (ideal for those intent on studying the late conductor’s technique), the preparation more thorough than in Abbado’s recent DVD Requiem (11/13).