Few pieces conjure up more immediately and vividly the comfortable middle-class world of the 1840s than Mendelssohn’s Songs Without Words. They provide a perfect soundtrack for Jane Austen – though she was writing several decades earlier – and while not all of them rise to the same level of lyrical inspiration, surely only the brown-rice-and-two-cold-baths-a-day brigade could fail to respond to Mendelssohn’s miraculous little tone-poems.

For his second volume of the Songs Without Words, Ronald Brautigam uses the same instrument as he did for the first – a 2010 piano by Paul McNulty, after an 1830 instrument by Pleyel. This instalment has the two remaining collections published in the composer’s lifetime, two further compilations (each again containing six pieces) published posthumously, five individual Songs, six Kinderstücke (1847) and two morceaux Aus dem Notenalbum für Eduard Benecke.

Looking back at my review of Vol 1 (3/13), I was rather too sniffy about the limitations of the Pleyel. Brautigam is no less revelatory in this repertoire than he was in his groundbreaking traversal of the Beethoven sonatas and concertos. Despite the rapid decay, the variety of tangy colours he conjures from the instrument really is the aural equivalent of removing a century of dirt from an oil painting, so that the hackneyed ones (‘Spinning Song’, ‘Spring Song’) come up freshly minted, and the less familiar, such as the gorgeous Op 62 No 1 in G major (the first track), make you wonder why some are not better known and more widely played.

If, like me, you have an irrational aversion to the fortepiano, Brautigam might well change your mind. It is fascinating to hear such familiar music much as Mendelssohn himself might have heard it. That said, I maintain that more than 73 minutes of works never intended to be heard in such a sequence is not the best way to appreciate his genius so that, despite the Dutchman’s great artistry, we may paraphrase Mr Bennett and suggest some way through the disc that ‘he has delighted us long enough’.