Even in an age when Mozart’s final concerto seems to be shedding its valedictory associations, Ronald Brautigam’s approach to the Larghetto may come as a shock. Where most pianists take around seven minutes, Brautigam despatches the movement in a brisk 5'20". If you expect an other-worldly reverie, look elsewhere. Yet while I wouldn’t always want to hear it like this, Brautigam’s performance is certainly refreshing. Taking note of the music’s march background and Mozart’s request for two, not four, beats to a bar, he phrases delicately and ornaments liberally to create a kind of abstracted playfulness. Throughout these discs, the fine copy of a 1795 Anton Walter fortepiano, with its strong differentiation between registers, combines enchantingly with the faintly breathy period wind. Brautigam also makes sparing but telling use of the sordino pedal.

While none of Brautigam’s other tempo choices is quite so radical, swiftness is a feature of all the performances here. Rarely have I heard the opening Allegro of K459 so airy and puckish, with the keyboard triplets darting gleefully amid the woodwind’s contrapuntal dialogues. This is mingled chamber music and opera buffa; and with the fortepiano taking its place within the orchestra, Brautigam makes you realise that in this movement, especially, the keyboard accompanies as much as it leads. If the no-nonsense tempo for the serenading Allegretto rather short-changes the wistful poetry distilled by other pianists, Brautigam and the ever-alert Cologne players are delightfully impish in the finale, where Mozart brilliantly infuses opera buffa intrigue with bouts of learned fugato.

In the D minor, K466, I sometimes craved more tonal weight than the 14-strong string contingent can muster. As partial compensation, trumpets and horns snarl and lour vividly through the texture. In the outer movements the fire and urgency of Brautigam’s playing, conceived in long, sweeping paragraphs, is always compelling. His articulation is a model of clarity, his passagework powerfully directed; and his own short, to-the-point cadenzas make a change from the usual Beethoven. Like K595’s Larghetto, the Romanze outdoes all comers in swiftness, and in the freedom with which Brautigam decorates Mozart’s artless lines. For the duration I was persuaded, not least in the torrential G minor outburst.

If Brautigam, true to form, chooses to downplay the melancholy undercurrents of K488’s first movement, his freshness and directness are fair compensation. The Adagio is predictably swift, with Brautigam gently lifting the dotted siciliano rhythm and filling in some of the notorious wide leaps near the end. As to the finale, it ‘flows like oil’ (to use a favourite phrase of Mozart’s), with passagework of scintillating grace and that sense of delighted collusion between keyboard and orchestra that marks each of these refreshing performances.