As David Threasher informed us back in March 2021, the first volume of the teenage Mozart’s violin concertos from Aisslinn Nosky turned out to be two-thirds reissues, the Third Concerto and the great E flat Sinfonia concertante having been released alongside the Handel and Haydn Society’s ‘eminently satisfying’ survey (to quote DT) of the latter composer’s ‘Paris’ and Sturm und Drang symphonies. DT concluded his review with the prophecy that ‘those who enjoyed Nosky’s recordings first time round … will keenly anticipate the follow-up volume’.

Interestingly, in preparing for these sessions Nosky gained access to the manuscripts. ‘By the time I reached the end of the project,’ she tells us, ‘I was struck by the change in his handwriting between his earlier concertos and the final A major Concerto. Teenage Mozart’s handwriting in the first two concertos is neat, tidy and deliberate; one gets the sense that perhaps Leopold was looking over his shoulder. By the Fifth Concerto, his handwriting appears more hurried and less careful, as if a deadline were nigh.’ You certainly pick up that shift from tidiness to hurriedness, even a sense of bubbling excitement, as she charts Mozart’s musical evolvement.

In this context I hear Nosky, the Handel and Haydn Society’s gifted concertmaster, as a forthright, rhythmically pungent player. I’d say that her tone as captured is wholesome and direct rather than especially sweet (DT’s assessment). But turn to Isaac Stern as recorded in London in 1976 with the English Chamber Orchestra under Alexander Schneider, and Stern’s potently extended expressive range, almost operatic in its effect, brings the music to life in a quite different way. Then again, Nosky’s account of the finale for K207 fair whizzes along, the friction of bow against string virtually palpable, a real tour de force; and the ‘Turkish’ interlude in K219’s finale is full of humour, especially around the cadenza’s eventful exit point (from Nosky’s veritable cadenza-fest, at 6'51") where you pick up the audience’s amused reaction.

I hear these enjoyable performances much as I probably would have done in the concert hall, happy to have been in attendance without necessarily wanting to keep them on my shelves. My preferred digital library recommendation features Gidon Kremer with his Kremerata Baltica, and if analogue sound isn’t a problem then Stern (under Schneider and Szell) is also highly recommended. I’m also very taken with Herman Krebbers’s Netherlands recording of K218 (included in Eloquence’s ‘Herman Krebbers Edition’). As to the issue under review, Coro’s sound is excellent, and so are Lindsay Kemp’s notes.