By all accounts – including those of the hostile Richard Wagner – Mendelssohn favoured urgent tempi when conducting his own and other men’s music. His metronome markings for the Scottish Symphony bear this out; and Thomas Fey and his eagerly responsive Heidelberg orchestra cleave closely to the composer’s prescribed tempi in all four movements. The upshot, with a lean, athletic “period” sonority (pared-down string tone, light articulation, hollering valveless brass, dry-rattling timpani) and sparing use of rubato, is virtually the swiftest, certainly the most abrasive Scottish on disc. Mindful of Mendelssohn’s original direction guerriero (“warlike”), Fey conducts a truly frenzied, bellicose finale, steely trumpets screaming through the texture.

The pentatonic-flavoured Scherzo is a delight: chortling woodwind, gleefully disruptive brass and a crucial Mendelssohnian quality of airy lightness – and thanks both to Fey’s ear for precise balance and Hänssler’s natural, transparent recording, the wind here compete on equal terms in their spats and sallies with the strings. As in Norrington’s similarly bracing performance with the London Classical Players, the Adagio is chaste and flowing, with detached phrasing and pungent accents (Harnoncourt, coaxing a warmer string sonority, is rather broader and more romantically flexible). Any reservations centre on the first movement, where Mendelssohn’s un poco agitato tends to emerge as agitatissimo. Fey and his Heidelbergers are certainly viscerally exciting but ultimately just too hectic and unyielding, not least in the evocations of vast, mysterious distances at the start of the development and coda, so well captured by Harnoncourt.

As on his recordings of the Italian and Reformation, Fey pairs a familiar “named” symphony with one of the delightful string symphonies of Mendelssohn’s indecently precocious teens. With its hyperactive, contrapuntally bristling outer movements and lusty Scherzo (complete with imported “Turkish” percussion) based on a traditional Swiss song, No 11 is among the most memorable. If Fey attacks the Menuetto fourth movement with a Beethovenian cussedness, he and his expert players vividly catch the music’s coursing energy and textural inventiveness, not least the young Mendelssohn’s love of viola colour.