Amid a vast array of recordings of Mozart’s lavish Gran Partita, performances on 18th-century instruments are still comparatively rare. Which makes this superb new version from one of Europe’s finest period bands all the more welcome. While the Berliners rival all comers in technical finesse, their sonorities are more tangily differentiated than in comparable modern-instrument performances. There’s a more palpable contrast, for instance, between liquid clarinets and husky basset-horns in, say, the first Trio of the first Minuet. Oboes have a more acidic edge, bassoons are deliciously ‘puffy’, and the valveless horns lend a pleasurable raucousness to the first movement’s home straight and the bucolic revels of the finale.

The Berlin players choose convincing, ‘central’ tempos, and reveal a sharp ear for balance and inner detail, not least in their weighting and shaping of the accompanying figures in the sublime Adagio. Dynamic contrasts, embracing a true pianissimo, are scrupulously observed. With the less smoothly blended period instruments, Mozart’s bittersweet dissonances, here and elsewhere, register that much more acutely.

The Berliners are also poets of their instruments. Among many felicities I’d cite clarinettist Markus Springer’s lovely fluid phrasing of his solos in the slow introduction and his eloquent, quasi-operatic duetting with Xenia Löffler’s oboe in Var 5 of the sixth movement. The two dance movements, each one a showcase for colour contrasts, are delectably characterised, from the mingled agitation and melancholy of the first Minuet’s G minor Trio (enhanced by the ‘buzz’ of the period bassoon) to the sublimated beer-garden music of the second Minuet’s ‘oompahing’ Trio. One small gripe: I wish the players had been less shy over ornamentation, especially in the theme and variations. Springer’s cheekily whooping embellishments in Var 2 reminded me of what I was missing elsewhere.

The first of Mozart’s great wind serenades, K375, performed here in in its revised Octet version, can too easily be overshadowed by the Gran Partita and the C minor Serenade, K388. But as the Akademie players remind us, this E flat Serenade, composed, as Mozart told his father, ‘rather carefully’, yields nothing to its companions in inventiveness and expressive reach.

From the opening, where oboe and clarinet lean gracefully into their dissonant suspensions, to the finale’s folkfest, burbling bassoons to the fore, this is another delightful performance. Again, the players imaginatively exploit the more acerbic sound world of their instruments. Accents sting more than in most modern-instrument performances; and those unkempt valveless horns, with their pungent contrast between stopped and unstopped notes, are always ready to roughen things up. There is wit and ebullience to spare here, yet also a keen feeling for the maestoso breadth of the first movement and the rapt tenderness of the Adagio, first cousin to the famous Adagio of the Gran Partita. In both works the Berliners can stand alongside the finest performances in the catalogue, including the identical coupling from their counterparts from the Berlin Philharmonic (EMI, 5/06). For those wanting the music played on the kinds of instruments that Mozart himself knew, this beautifully recorded new version sweeps the field.