Isabelle Faust and Alexander Melnikov’s period instrument traversal of Mozart’s sonatas for fortepiano and violin reaches its midpoint in the finely crafted interrogative and illuminating style that marked the previous three volumes.

If you’re already familiar with the series you will need no recommendation to acquire this latest instalment. If you’re yet to encounter it, Volume 4 is as good a place as any to start, straddling as it does Mannheim innovation and late Vienna maturity when the violin was elevated from mere accompanist to equal partner with the piano.

Faust’s use of the 1704 Stradivarius ‘Sleeping Beauty’ and Melnikov’s modern fortepiano modelled after the late 18th-century Viennese master builder Anton Walter, provide two distinctive voices that even so prove an harmonious match, tonally, dynamically, colouristically and in the bel canto singing quality of both.

Their playing styles, immediately noticeable in the effortless switching from playfulness to poise in the opening C major K.296, are equally attuned. The elegant Andante sostenuto is despatched with a precision that takes liberties with its suspended stop-start moments but stays always, adroitly, within the bounds of propriety.

In the same key, the unconventionally structured two-movement K.303 with its contrasts between cautious reserve and excited exuberance is delivered with consummate interplay between both instruments, the minuet finale a delightful cat-and-mouse game marked by animated cheek and charm. That provoking contest carries over into the spirited Allegro and finale of the E-flat major K.380 where Faust and Melnikov take obvious delight in chasing each other’s tails.

That contrasting contest is carried over from its measuredly sober middle movement into the symphonic scale, daring harmonies, and conversational élan of K.481, also in E-flat major. Here is music by turns dazzlingly inventive, profound, mischievously playful and always amenable, qualities dispatched with effortlessly pointed élan. 

The catalogue isn’t exactly crowded with historically informed accounts of these works. On that basis alone – and, not least, for their vitality, intelligence and musicality – Faust and Melnikov are already shaping up to lock antlers with current recommendation, Rachel Podger and Gary Cooper on Channel Classics. If subsequent volumes maintain the quality threshold of the first four, it may well result in a new first choice for this repertoire.

The recorded sound, in Berlin’s Teldex Studio, is full but detailed and perfectly balanced.

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Composer: Mozart
Works: Sonatas for Fortepiano and Violin, Volume 4
Performers: Isabelle Faust v, Alexander Melnikov p
Label: Harmonia Mundi HMM902617