Having recorded the complete symphonies of both Haydn (Sony) and Bruckner (Arte Nova), Dennis Russell Davies is well placed to tackle the particularities of Schubert’s intermediary idiom. The inner movements of the Second present just such a Janus-faced approach in microcosm. A pretty Andante tune gains warmth and grace with each added voice and every succeeding variation; the journey through major and minor, before hard-won quietude in the major, is one Haydn had taken with the Andante of the Drumroll Symphony.

The Basle orchestra make neat play with legato and staccato articulations from wind and strings respectively but Davies finds little more than clockwork charm. Down the road in Zurich, David Zinman’s Tonhalle players use more pointed accents and lift the dotted rhythms. He brings real menace and not merely repetition to the Minuet’s stamping gait. Perhaps the Tonhalle band is smaller than the Basle string complement of 12.10.8.6.4; it’s certainly more agile. Davies forswears both the ornamentation that Zinman reasonably sees as Schubert’s Haydnesque inheritance, and the second-half repeat which turns the first movement into a labyrinthine tarantella.

The stakes are higher in the Sixth, and the difference between interpretations still more pronounced. In this neat, polished and pretty inconsequential performance it’s easy to hear why Schubert would offer the Ninth to his publisher as his first symphony, passing over Nos 1 6 as teenage essays and thereby permitting everyone else to do likewise. The previous two volumes in the series (covering Symphonies Nos 3, 5 and 9) do not burst with the verve and imagination that would suggest this disc to be an aberration.