As the booklet note confirms, this recording is ‘a celebration of 30 years of music-making’ between the splendid Galliard Ensemble and pianist Sam Haywood, who first met while studying at London’s Royal Academy of Music. The album’s title relates partly to that initial encounter but more to Mozart’s Quintet, K452, allegedly written with Hindemithian alacrity in a single day (March 30, 1784) and the first for the combination of piano and solo wind instruments (wind quintet minus the flute). As David Threasher noted when reviewing Jean-Efflam Bavouzet’s recording (12/18), Mozart regarded it as one of his finest works, and it is not hard to hear why, a work of sublime inspiration and compositional ease, and rendered here with consummate skill.

Of course, K452 is a much-recorded work (the Presto Classical database lists well over 100 versions, plus dozens of reissues) and the competition is fierce. Haywood and the Galliard’s approach is vivacious and well-balanced, with impeccable intonation and ensemble. The opening Allegro rattles along nicely and the central Larghetto is touchingly beautiful. Nevertheless, the best of the recent versions, by Les Vents Français with Éric Le Sage (a Gramophone Editor’s Choice) and Manchester Camerata and Bavouzet, have an extra degree of vim and joie de vivre that Haywood and the Galliard players cannot quite match.

Couplings will be a concern for collectors, I suspect. Bavouzet coupled it with the contemporary piano concertos, K450 and K451, a sparkling disc, marvellously well engineered. Les Vents Français’s account is part of a three-disc set that also features Ludwig Thuille’s delightfully manicured B flat major Sextet (1888), a work of undoubted appeal but which plumbs few depths. To be honest, I find little to choose between this newcomer and Les Vents Français’s account. Poulenc’s piquant Trio (1926 – the year before he began the Concert champêtre) rounds off the Galliard’s programme, completing a telling musical arc from the Classical to the neoclassical, via Romanticism, all caught in nicely produced sound.