Hans Gál entered his First Symphony in a worldwide competition for works celebrating the 1928 centenary of Schubert’s death. Gál was pipped at the post in the Austrian section by Franz Schmidt’s Third Symphony but the juxtaposition of Gál and Schubert on this Northern Sinfonia disc is a happy one. The orchestral playing in Schubert’s “Little” C major Symphony of 1817‑18 is crisp of rhythm, lucid of texture and both warm and spirited in expression. The Viennese character of the symphony is aglow throughout a performance in which Thomas Zehetmair finds a mellifluous way of shaping melody while keeping the momentum virile and the music buoyant. The contrasts and correspondences between the Andante’s lyrical opening and its brisker central passage are executed with special deftness but the entire performance exudes a genuine delight in Schubert’s palette of orchestral colours.

Gál’s First Symphony, completed in 1927, represents the Viennese tradition of a century later, an age of liquid harmony and, as exemplified by the odd Expressionist touch in the otherwise subdued first movement (originally entitled “Idyll”), an intensity of emotion. Gál’s roots were firmly planted in the soil of Brahms and Strauss. A classical sense of order was allied to a romantic soul, with no hint that he was in any way seduced by Schoenberg. Zehetmair’s admirably structured account of the First Symphony and the Northern Sinfonia’s luminous playing of it highlight a (then young) composer who had something to say and voiced it with sensibility and conviction.