I don’t know who first called the Suite in C ‘in the style of Handel’; it certainly wasn’t Mozart, nor anyone really familiar with Handel’s suites. It’s an interesting work, rarely heard – it begins with a French-overture type of movement, goes on to an Allemande and a Courante, then a few bars of a Sarabande, and then stops (like so many of Mozart’s works that lie off the main stream of his musical thinking). The two dances, especially, show him viewing these antique forms through a Classical filter. The music works far better on a fortepiano – this one is after a Walter, the make Mozart preferred in his late years – than on a modern instrument. Andreas Staier plays beautifully crisply in the Ouverture, and with great delicacy and refinement in the Allemande, and he presents a convincing completion of his own of the Sarabande. Of course, a gigue is needed to complete a suite: and here Staier plays the Gigue K574 that Mozart wrote (alas, in the wrong key) many years later, a brilliant and eccentric piece, done with great verve.

The K282 Sonata, very much a connoisseur’s piece, comes next, a pensive, gently expressive account of its slow first movement, the detail exquisitely placed (and with some imaginative and wholly apposite touches of decoration in the repeats). I wonder if he plays the minuet a shade too rapidly after that; I found the spell too abruptly broken. But it’s a gem of a sonata, and satisfyingly done.

Staier uses a more robust style for the later works. To the Gluck variations he brings, very properly, an improvisatory air, as if it were one of those sets of variations that Mozart famously could dash off impromptu. The result is impressive. There is certainly an air of the impromptu, too, about the C minor Fantasia, for this is also a quasi-improvisation, no doubt worked out more carefully on paper than even Mozart could do at the keyboard, but the manner is the same, and the fire and passion that Staier brings to it must certainly be of the kind that Mozart did. And it is, as before, sensitive playing, keenly alert to the implications of everything in the music.

He retains something of that flexibility when it comes to the C minor Sonata, pressing forward, holding back and so on more than he would, I imagine, in most Mozart sonatas – but then, none calls for it as this one does. It is a very dramatic reading. The Adagio, with its extraordinary richness of detail, profits greatly from the clear and sharp articulation of the fortepiano: what sounds cumbrous on a modern grand sounds makes expressive sense here. The finale is a stormy piece and Staier pulls no punches, letting the music sound quite explosive at times. I wonder if it would work slightly better with a marginally smaller dynamic palette; but perhaps this is what is needed, for it truthfully represents Mozart breaking down the idiomatic barriers of his time. A superlative disc.