According to the blurb on the back cover of his Mozart sonata cycle, Fazıl Say aims to capture ‘a certain naturalness’ in his interpretations. That means that the pianist does what comes naturally to him in classical repertoire. He monkeys around with articulations, shocks you with unexpected accents, balances chords in strange ways and brings inner voices (both real and invented) to the fore. If Glenn Gould tore through Mozart like a graffiti artist hell-bent on mayhem, Say’s affectations are analogous to animated cartoons. That said, these works generally manage to contain and absorb Say’s affettuoso style.

Take the Rondo alla turca’s exaggerated bass-lines, for example. At first they seem pointlessly mannered, but by the third or fourth time around, the music’s militant subtext hits home. Depending on your perspective, K330’s first movement’s audaciously ornamented right-hand cantabiles are either supported by or chained to Say’s tick-tock, disco-beat Alberti bass. By contrast, the ‘easy’ K545 that all young piano students struggle over transpires normally (relatively speaking), save for a wickedly fast and effective finale.

While Say’s tempi don’t broach Gould’s zany extremes, some of them are abjectly unorthodox. Those expecting a brooding, depth-probing C minor Fantasy, K475, will be surprised at Say’s headlong, sometimes unyielding and arguably trivial interpretation. Then the first movement of the C minor Sonata, K457, sternly unfolds at considerably less than the composer’s Molto allegro directive. Say’s broad approach to the opening Allegro of the D major, K576, lends uncommon clarity to the embellishments, while the pianist imbues each of the variations in K284’s lengthy final movement with a specific character, rather than striving for unified continuity. Here, however, one must contend with outsize feminine endings and jabbing left-hand accents on the repeats. On the other hand, K282’s central Menuet, so often taken at a dainty three beats to the bar, gains thrust and profile by virtue of Say’s faster, one-beat-to-a-bar conception.

The dynamism of K332’s outer movements soars over the proverbial footlights in appropriately operatic fashion, although the slow movement’s lyrical calm sometimes falls prey to overdone staccatos. The latter seem to be a speciality of the house, as borne out by K261’s Rondeau. Say’s skittish dry-point traversal of K570’s Allegretto underlines the music’s intrinsic humour in a way that will give purists pause yet might also have elicited a knowing wink from the composer. Say’s astute timing and sensitive harmonic pointing enliven the first-movement Allegro of the G major, K283, compensating for the pianist’s relatively flat, undifferentiated Presto finale. Further proof that Say can play simply and directly when he chooses to can be found in his intelligent dynamic scaling of K533’s Rondo, where he brings out the main theme’s music-box sensibility to otherworldly effect.

Say’s overall presentation proves equally provocative. He orders each CD according to key signature. Disc 1 features sonatas in A minor, with the four C major sonatas on disc 2. Discs 3, 4 and 5 are respectively given over to F major, D major and B flat major, while the C minor, E flat major and G major stragglers occupy disc 6. Say invents fanciful subtitles for each sonata (‘Above the Clouds’ for K533, ‘Two Sisters’ for K330 and so forth), and discusses his personal responses to the sonatas in flowery prose. Some of the pianist’s notions are plausible, such as relationship of the E flat Sonata, K282, to Haydn’s aesthetic, while others, like the K457 Sonata as a parallel to Goethe’s poem ‘Erlkönig’, read like missives from the bubble. Check out this release if you want Mozart with a twist, but my tried-and-true first choices remain with Klara Würtz, Ingrid Haebler, András Schiff and Maria João Pires.