Between 2003 and 2006, the Berlin Philharmonic devoted two concerts each season to what was in effect a Harnoncourt Schubert cycle. The series featured the complete symphonies, the last two Masses and a concert performance of Schubert’s musically beguiling but theatrically compromised ‘Romantic opera in three acts’ Alfonso und Estrella, of which Harnoncourt has long been a noted exponent.

None of the old record companies would have dreamt of packaging such a mix of works within a single nine-disc set, let alone in a box as beautiful and as impractical as this. (Oblong in shape, it has an irremovable 104-page booklet which can be read only if the entire 21-inch wide, 1lb structure is fully opened out.)

Unusual juxtapositions can, however, provide unusual insights. The catalysts here are Alfonso und Estrella and the Mass in A flat, a work described by Wilfrid Mellers in that fine book Celestial Music? (Boydell Press: 2002) as being ‘in its very oddities a transcendent masterpiece’. Unlike the better known and ecclesiastically more circumspect E flat Mass, the A flat is a maverick work whose moods can unsettle believers as surely as its modulatory flights can unsettle performers.

Something of a maverick himself, Harnoncourt has the genius to meet the composer on his own chosen ground and deliver the work (such are his skills as a choral conductor) with the surest of touches. He also draws ravishing sounds from the orchestra, a musical necessity if we are to catch the strange transcendent beauty of such things as Schubert’s astonishing 29-bar setting of the Sanctus.

The performance of the E flat Mass is less interesting and less well recorded. Harnoncourt finds inspiration in the ‘Domine Deus’ and in Schubert’s unforgettable setting of the Agnus Dei, but he takes the sotto voce opening of the Credo at an impossibly quick tempo (it sounds more like a Rossinian conspiracy than a Schubertian meditation) and allows the accompaniment to drown out the lovely cello melody in the ‘Et incarnatus’.

Something similar happens in the Trio of the Third Symphony’s third movement, where a weak first oboe finds itself competing with an over-prominent violin staccato beneath. Perhaps the Berlin recording is partly to blame. In Harnoncourt’s Royal Concertgebouw set of the symphonies the passage is perfectly balanced.

That 1992 set remains very fine, more classical in temper, you might say, than these more romantically inflected Berlin performances. The Berliners have the more effulgent sound, which Harnoncourt deploys with skill and imagination, if not always with the kind of on-the-spot incisiveness which Karl Böhm demonstrated in his celebrated Berlin cycle (DG, 5/73). The real problem here is not texture but that old bugbear, Harnoncourt’s occasionally maverick way (that phrase again) with rhythm and pulse.

Compared with Harnoncourt’s 1992 Concertgebouw version, this Berlin account of the ‘Great’ C major is frankly a mess where the work’s larger rhythms are concerned, with the orchestra itself perceptibly ill-at-ease. And though he has abandoned his overly slow tempo for the finale of the Sixth Symphony, the so-called ‘Little’ C major, this too is all over the place when it comes to pacings within individual movements.

Harnoncourt gives terrific performances of the first two symphonies, which emerge as the testosterone-fuelled creations of a young man who knows his Beethoven and who has no fear of dissonance. But even here things can come unstuck. It’s Harnoncourt’s belief that in a Schubert text ‘decrescendo always means softer, whereas diminuendo means softer and slower [my italic]’. The effect of this idea is to cause an otherwise gloriously realised account of the Second Symphony’s concluding Presto vivace to go into dying-swan mode on no fewer than three occasions.

Harnoncourt has always been a superb interpreter of the Tragic Fourth Symphony – I know of no finer – while his account of the Unfinished Symphony is more predictably and unremittingly tragic. ‘A Schubert canvas in the manner of a last work by Rembrandt or Tintoretto, deep, dark, grim beyond measure’ was how I described Karajan’s 1975 Berlin recording of the Unfinished (EMI, 2/79). Harnoncourt’s performance is not dissimilar, some moments of Mahler-like arhythmia in the opening movement notwithstanding.

Alfonso und Estrella deserves a separate release and with it the further discussion and comparisons that that would bring. Suffice it to say that the Berlin cast is more than a match for that on the famous Suitner set (EMI-Electrola, 6/79, now on Brilliant Classics) and that Harnoncourt’s direction, aided by the Berliners’ own peerless playing, is a joy from start to finish.