If you like your early Schubert lean of tone and impetuous of spirit, you should enjoy the Potsdam Kammerakademie in this most sportive of his symphonies. In the first movement conductor Antonello Manacorda can be over-excitable, urging the music on at the cost of absolute rhythmic stability. For grace and poise go to Abbado (DG) or, with an added affectionate twinkle, Beecham (EMI). But with alert woodwind (always clearly audible in the tuttis) and scything valveless brass pitted against a small string band of around 20, the Potsdamers vividly catch the music’s coursing youthful energy. The artless Allegretto is agreeably dapper (though Manacorda pushes on the yodelling clarinet solo in the middle section), while conductor and orchestra relish the Haydn-meets-Rossini high jinks of the tarantella finale. The coda’s theatrical climax, culminating in a dissonant ‘purple’ chord, is thrillingly built and clinched.

The Unfinished inspired more equivocal reactions. On the plus side is the textural clarity of the performance, caught in a pleasantly spacious acoustic. The slender string body allows unusual prominence to Schubert’s powerful, innovatory brass-writing: say, in the tuttis of the second movement, where the off-beat accents of horns and trombones cut through with uncommon force. I like, too, the dominance of the trombones as they balefully intone the ‘motto’ in the first movement’s development (usually they are subdued by cellos and basses). Against this, the strings inevitably lack something in weight and intensity at the cataclysmic climax early in the development; and, while the famous second subject is held down to pianissimo, as Schubert asks, the fragile cello sonority (produced by, at a guess, just three players) may take some getting used to. Here and elsewhere the shaping of the lyrical melodies may strike you as rather too literal: Abbado and the more impulsive Carlos Kleiber (also DG) both strike a fine balance between fidelity to the score and subjective poetic insight.

My most serious proviso, though, concerns the relative pacing of the two movements: the first movement is taken at a steady, and steadily held, traditional speed, while the Andante rivals or even eclipses such period practitioners as Norrington and Mackerras (both Virgin) in swiftness, its lyricism slightly harried. The upshot is that two triple-time movements unfold at virtually the same pulse, which surely can’t be right.