This set of Schubert’s symphonies arrives just in time for the 225th anniversary of the composer’s birth. While a good few cycles have been launched (and a couple completed) over the past two or three years, it’s worthwhile to have a collection such as this, the product of a project to perform all this music in concert over four days at the Schubertiade in Hohenems. After all, Schubert seems less susceptible to the jubilee jamboree that attends certain other composers. It’ll be the 200th anniversary of his death in 2028 – but who’s to say by then we won’t be more concerned with sleeping off the hangover from yet another Beethoven bunfight the previous year?

It’s valuable, too, to have another opportunity to trace Schubert’s development through the first six symphonies, written between the ages of 16 and 21 (1813 18) and showing the young composer’s individual voice emerging faster than he could cast off the influences of the music he heard around him. There’s a gap of a few years before the visionary style of the mature symphonist was made evident in the Unfinished (1822) and ‘Great’ C major (largely completed by 1826). His symphonic trajectory was just as remarkable as that of his elder contemporary but he had achieved it all by the time he was 29 years old – an age at which Beethoven was still to embark upon his symphonic odyssey.

In among the seven and a half symphonies, Michi Gaigg and her L’Orfeo Baroque Orchestra intersperse some of the sketches, including some (D2) put down as early as 1810 11 for a symphony evidently of staggering ambition and scale (with an orchestra already including three trombones). The ‘Chaos’ opening of Haydn’s Creation audibly features strongly in Schubert’s range of references as he reorders and distils his material in successive attempts at the progression from prefatory adagio to symphonic allegro. Later fragments include broken transitions and scribbled try-outs for sequences of orchestral and harmonic effects. The most fascinating of these shards, though, is the opening of Symphony ‘No 7’ in E, D729, sketched in full in 1821 but orchestrated only until part way through the opening movement, and hinting tantalisingly at entirely new harmonic and sonic vistas.

As for the performances themselves, they are situated closer to the drive and energy of René Jacobs’s readings with the period-instrument B’Rock Orchestra than to the sleeker but more relaxed approach of (for example) Heinz Holliger, with the modern strings and winds but natural brass of the Basel Chamber Orchestra. Whereas Holliger opts for understated grandeur and Jacobs for turbulence and molten tempos, Gaigg offers more central readings based on an orchestral palette notable for some super-saturated wind sonorities, bolstered by strident brass and a strong, resonant bass. A gallimaufry of noises off (key clicks and stage noise but barely any audience shuffle) may preclude the set from becoming an audiophile option but the 300-seat Markus Sittikus Hall offers plenty of bloom around the orchestral sound, perhaps at the expense of richness from the slimline string section (6.6.4.3.2 in the earlier symphonies, with an extra sprinkling of violins for the Ninth). One upshot of this is that dialogues between strings and wind – in the finale of the Fourth, for example – become a bit one-sided.

Gaigg and L’Orfeo major on the Beethovenian momentum that drives the ‘juvenile’ works, although not at the expense of the buffo elements of (especially) the Third and Sixth Symphonies: the solo oboe and clarinet (Carin van Heerden and Markus Springer), in particular, are full of character. Perhaps the transition from slow introduction to Allegro vivace in the Second is a touch awkward, and listeners may wish the cello-and-bass opening of the Eighth to be nourished a little more generously. But otherwise these players barely put a foot wrong in performances that sound as though they may have been subject to only the lightest of patching. Comparison with the same forces’ earlier recording of the Fifth Symphony demonstrates a more robust studio sound, although the live recording displays a greater degree of rhythmic incisiveness.

The Eighth and Ninth are viewed in this context as natural evolutions from the earlier symphonies rather than via the filter of the postmodern lens, refracted through the expansive lyricism of Bruckner and Brahms – two composers whose symphonic output would surely have been radically different without Schubert’s far-reaching influence over the remainder of the century. In fact it is the ‘Great’ C major that is perhaps the gem of the present set: a notably intense performance, played with tireless propulsion and infectious fervour – a world away from the octogenarian Boult in 1972 (see this month’s Classics Reconsidered on page 92), to whose distilled wisdom of a lifetime it presents a distinctly contrasting view of this overwhelming, multifaceted work.