“With Mozart, the fortepiano is so much a part of the texture of the whole piece that it’s really one with the orchestra,” fortepianist Melvyn Tan wrote in Limelight. “Every now and again it surges up to play a wonderful melody, but then it goes back again into the texture.”

Tan brought these ideas to life in his performance of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No 18, K456 – written in 1784, probably for the extraordinary blind pianist (and organist, singer and composer) Theresia von Paradis for her Paris tour – with period instrument band the Australian Haydn Ensemble. Performing on a Walter & Sohn replica by historical keyboard maker Chris Maene, Tan was as much a member of the ensemble as he was its director, leading from the keyboard. Hunched forward over the keyboard, his nimble solo entry sprung to life out of the silence that followed the opening orchestral tutti – the cleverness of Mozart’s orchestration is much more apparent when performed with period instruments, and changes in register take on a significance often lost on the modern concert grand.

In Tan’s hands the Allegro vivace was bouncy and characterful, the fortepianist moving seamlessly between dispatching florid solo lines and conducting...