Even for a musician so precociously gifted as Mozart, there was a big difference between a symphony written at the age of 17 (or perhaps 18—someone has carefully blurred the date on the manuscript of K200) and one composed at 23; and this coupling illustrates his advances during that time in thematic character, chromaticism and contrapuntal thinking. (Too much, however, has been made of the appearance of the familiar Jupiter Symphony four-note figure in the first movement—at indeed, in slightly disguised form, in the second subject of the second—of K319; it was a not uncommon tag of the period.) Levine's treatment of these two works is bouyant and alert, though the first movement of each (both in triple time) is less than ideally stable, with a suspicion of hurrying: in the Italianate K200 there is a noticeable tendency to move too soon off the initial crotchet of a bar. Levine takes K319 faster and more lightly than Harnoncourt on Teldec, whose Andante is too ponderous and self-conscious and whose Minuet (a movement Mozart added later) is too stolid; but he doesn't succeed, any more than Harnoncourt does, in making the hairpin crescendos in the Andante sound altogether natural. He observes all the 12 possible repeats in K200, which does make its Andante seem too repetitious, beautifully as the muted Vienna strings sing their gentle refrain; and (unlike Harnoncourt) in K319 he makes the repeats at the da capo of theMinuet.
It is obvious that the symphonies were recorded at different times. In the C major (which despite the inclusion of trumpets in its scoring is not a ceremonial or martial work) trumpet tone is, rightly, not allowed to dominate; the horn echoes in the Minuet are well balanced; the antiphonal placing of the first and second violins is most effective; but the oboes are too faint throughout, with particularly weak interjections in the Allegro's second subject. There is, fortunately, no such imbalance in the B flat Symphony, which comes over very cleanly.'