‘I do not pass it off as one of my best,’ said Beethoven modestly of his Piano Concerto No 2 in B flat to his publisher; he’d tinkered with it for ten years, in four separate versions. That may have been the period when Beethoven was wrenching himself free of Mozart’s influence, but the way Murray Perahia played this work – leading the Academy of St Martin in the Fields from the keyboard – it emerged with its particular perfection intact.

There was authority in his beat, and warmth in his attack, as piano and orchestra developed their dialogue in the opening Allegro con brio, while the keyboard recitative in the Adagio – one of Beethoven’s most expansively eloquent early slow movements – had lovely poise; the boisterousness of the concluding Rondo was kept within the bounds of eighteenth-century decorum.