One commodity that is never in short supply in René Jacobs and B’Rock’s Schubert symphony survey is excitement. Period strings tick nervily through outer movements, sforzandos thrust and sting, and hard sticks rebound off timpani like gunshots. Slow movements never linger; that of Symphony No 4 is a true andante, that of No 5 fully con moto. Only scherzos have yet to persuade: the Fourth’s makes little sense at such a lick (it comes in at a few seconds over 3'00"), while the Fifth’s – designated Menuetto, even if it’s marked Allegro molto – simply sounds harassed, removed from its audible Mozartian model.

Comments on the previous two instalments in this cycle (2/19, A/20) pertain here, as does the observation that this youthful ensemble are truly finding their groove. Jacobs imparts a singular musical intelligence to everything he conducts, making this a thoroughly consistent cycle; whatever your view of his quirks and idiosyncrasies, they are all his own and are without doubt deeply considered. Love or hate his Schubert (and his tinkering with the tempo in the Fifth’s finale might sway you one way or the other), you can’t ignore it.

Only the Unfinished Eighth and Great Ninth are left for Jacobs and his Ghent-based band to tackle. They could do worse than take as their role model Heinz Holliger, who embarked upon his cycle in Basel with an eminently satisfying Ninth (2/19), the product of a long career’s contemplation, and now winds up the series with an Eighth of similar merit. Unlike Jacobs, Holliger is in no rush – but then, this music’s motor is situated in a different place from that of the earlier symphonies. The influence of the 18th century has been fully left behind and the voice, conception and symphonic outlook are now all Schubert’s own, as we gaze down the barrel of the 19th century. Holliger allows the music to unfold naturally, with plenty of mellifluous woodwind and a vibrato-lite approach that does nothing to compromise the richness of tone of the string body.

Previous volumes have offered overtures to stage works in pursuit of context and value. Here the Unfinished is prefaced by a realisation by Roland Moser (b1943) of some of the enigmatic sketches for the projected Symphony No 10 (D936a), also in B minor and haunting in its spareness and unfulfilled promise. A funeral march scored for a sonorous nonet of brass and winds by the 16-year-old composer is mirrored by Moser in an Echoraum (‘Echo-Space’) that reframes it for orchestra in postmodernist terms, and the disc closes with another comparative rarity, Webern’s echt Viennese orchestration of a sequence of piano Ländler. But the Unfinished remains the main event here, forming a memorable conclusion to a rewarding series.