Angular or strident sounds are not a part of Christian Blackshaw’s technique. Instead a horizontally even line and lucid touch sustain his vision of Mozart. Ancient words from Alec Rowley’s assessment of the composer – ‘limpid freshness, exquisite gracefulness, the music containing the essence of childhood and the fragrance of simplicity’ – arise in part when confronted by limpidity and gracefulness in Blackshaw’s style expressed through pianism of enviable command, every note weighted and articulated with care. Echoes of Walter Gieseking’s technique resound here but without the imperturbable facility he displayed in his recordings of Mozart’s keyboard music 60 years ago. Blackshaw isn’t imperturbable. It’s easy to hear how committed he is to the music; but a reverential detachment inhibits engagement with the full expressive potential of every work.

Not though in the Fantasie K475 or the Sonata K457. Rowley appears to have had no knowledge of them. Blackshaw has knowledge; and it’s deep, interpreting Mozart’s bi-polar mood swings so prevalent in these works to be more depressive than manic. Eruptions aren’t sharply profiled but are expressed within an ambiance closer to desolation than frenzy. Musicians like Kristian Bezuidenhout sense the extremes. Blackshaw plumbs an underlying haunting sorrow. It’s another view; and a profound one. Strange, then, that he should distance himself from the subjective in other works. This fastidious musician so superfine in execution who in the greatest music on this disc scales heights to project content, now seems to prefer politely reasoned statements to close involvement. The purist in him offers in Variation 11 of the last movement of K284 Mozart’s plainer autograph score in contrast to the usually played decorated version published in the first edition; and does so with much feeling and sensitivity. There are similar instances of perception and illumination, eg a sense of drama in the first-movement developments of K332 and K545, but otherwise Blackshaw’s performances of these three sonatas are dispassionately uninvolving. In their separate ways Alfred Brendel, Daniel-Ben Pienaar and Maria João Pires combine rhetoric with introspection to penetrate the richly mercurial spirit behind the notes. Blackshaw usually stands back.