This new recording from Atlantic Canada of Mozart’s magnificent duos for violin and viola delights with a sense of unleashed HIP fun that’s closer to Woodstock than Wigmore Hall. It’s what Dorian Komanoff Bandy believes audiences would have expected from professional performers in Mozart’s day, based on his recent book for the University of Chicago Press, Mozart the Performer.

That it’s an Urtext editor’s nightmare will be immediately apparent at 1'44" of the G major Duo’s first movement, at the double bar, when Bandy and Catherine Cosbey – playing on period instruments made in Mittenwald and Innsbruck – take all sorts of liberties with the bare musical lines, especially the numerous repeats, with a profusion of musicologically sound turns, trills, flourishes, bouncing bows, unexpected accents, short bridge passages and surprise cadenzas that identify convincingly with Mozart’s theatrical side. It may infuriate purists but it will resonate with any musician who has ever played Mozart at chamber music parties.

It’s in the repeats that most of the action happens – especially so in the closing Andante grazioso of the B flat Duo – and so Bandy and Cosbey took all that their recording budget allowed (in Mozart’s time, Bandy assumes, all the repeats would have happened). And because they were treating the recording as a scholarly experiment as well as a musical one, Bandy composed the embellishments and cadenzas beforehand to make sure the results reflected his ideas accurately.

The disc also includes premiere recordings of newly discovered contemporaneous arrangements for two violins: an interesting curiosity in the Violin Sonata, K305, and an entertaining five-scene version of La clemenza di Tito in which the implicitly theatrical nature of the duos is made explicit and ‘Parto, parto’ sounds quite affecting.

The recordings, made at St Andrew’s United Church in Halifax, NS, capture the beauty of the instruments and the skills of the two performers on an honest, natural soundstage.