Mozart: Piano Concerto No. 23, Symphony No. 40 & Don Giovanni Overture

Listening to period-instrument band Le Concert de la Loge’s high-speed, micro-inflected, fine-tuned reflexes bristling away in the Overture to Don Giovanni, it’s hard to believe that this music was once played in slow, leaden performances by the likes of conducting legends Otto Klemperer and Karl Böhm. Thankfully, musical fashions changed rapidly, and it took only a few decades to bring energy and freshness back to Mozart, and to rediscover the sparkling textures and startling dynamic interchanges that pepper his music. Under the inspired and exuberant direction of Julien Chauvin, the Symphony No. 40 also surges along, articulated by lithe strings, deft woodwind and gloriously rasping horns. Yet it is the ravishing Piano Concerto No. 23 in A Major, K. 488 that in soloist Andreas Staier’s skilled hands emerges totally transformed, from a proto-Romantic dreamscape into a vibrant, emotionally galvanising trailblazer.