This is some of the best Mozart conducting you will ever hear. These performances are above all triumphs of experience, innate musicality and understanding, meticulous yet clear thinking, and… the art of listening.

Mozart emerges here as a vital elixir: using the period-instrument orchestra he founded to perform music of the classical era, Abbado brings a time-honoured Mozartian tradition, learnt from the pianists Friedrich Gulda and Rudolf Serkin, to bear on these much-recorded works. The prestos of the Haffner and “Prague” positively tingle with excitement; the great finale of the Jupiter reveals Mozart’s complex counterpoint with unerring clarity. Textures are bright and clear, the balance between wind and strings is ideal and the sublime melodies of the slow movements are “sung” with an Italianate cantilena Mozart would surely have revelled in. A classic set.

Throughout these symphonies, recorded "live" with his young, hand-picked orchestra, articulation is crisp and pointed, vibrato abstemiously applied. Mozart's intricate contrapuntal textures in the first movement of the Prague and the finale of the Jupiter have rarely sounded so lucid. There is no denying the finesse of Abbado's phrasing and his care for inner detail. The flowing tempos for the andantes are ideally chosen. Too often, though, I hear coolness, a touch of over-calculation, in Abbado's conducting. Some of the detached, period-style bowing can sound finicky. The outer movements of the Jupiter and the stupendous first movement of the Prague have nothing like the incandescence of Charles Mackerras's recent Scottish Chamber Orchestra recordings (Linn).

The booklet quotes Abbado saying, “The study of phrasing in Mozart is endless.” Yes indeed, and the fruits are borne out in the conductor's live performances of five selected symphonies with his bouncy, young Orchestra Mozart. The Haffner first movement is especially thrilling and the pianissimos in No 29 would charm a mouse. Effects in No 33 seem more heavy-handed, but the set’s major drawback is the sound: constricted in tuttis, lacking air.