The chief delight in this first offering from The English Concert under its new director, Andrew Manze, is the performance of the Serenata notturna, K239. This piece, with its curious setting for two violins, viola and bass as a solo group against the string tutti, with timpani, has a charm all of its own, but one that sometimes proves elusive. Not here: Manze paces it beautifully (which is quite difficult), and he catches its unique mixture of the elegant and (in the finale) the near-rumbustious.

I enjoyed the first movement above all, for Manze’s own shapely violin playing, the neatly pointed accents, the happy balance between the groups (although the timps seem quite prominent in the resonant acoustic of this recording). The minuet, too, is a delight, and there is witty and subtle timing in the finale, from Manze in particular, and the orchestra plays sensitively and responsively for him. I’m not quite so sure about the inserted timp cadenza, which I find noisy and intrusive; well, never mind, for this is a lovely performance of an endearing work.

The Nachtmusik goes pretty well, too. Rhythms are spruce, the articulation is light and clear; I liked the springiness of the minuet and the touches of humour in the finale. There are details that one might not like (the unnatural diminuendo on the upward phrase in bar 10, for example) but it’s as pleasing a performance as any.

No one could say that the C minor Adagio and Fugue was one of Mozart’s most ingratiating pieces, but the clarity and the delicacy of this performance argue its case impressively, and it is strongly shaped here, too, with no diminution of its power. The little minuet K485a/506a comes from the books of exercises that are relics of the lessons Mozart gave Thomas Attwood – he got Attwood to provide a setting for his melody (or in part bass) and later showed him how it could be done better; I imagine this is its first recording.

Then lastly there is Ein musikalischer Spass; this is Mozart’s Musical Joke, demonstrating all the solecisms perpetrated by inept composers of the period, plus a few glosses of his own. Do we take it too seriously? Is it worth performing, or devoting 23 minutes of a CD to it? I personally think not: it is, as Mozart intended, very bad music, full of progressions that are ‘forbidden’ because they sound so banal, and it falls painfully on the ears. But if you like it, you won’t hear it better done than it is here.