The appointment of Maxim Emelyanychev to the principal conductorship of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra was a bold and eye-catching move, pairing a Russian musician hitherto best known as a period-instrument specialist with one of the UK’s foremost mid-size orchestras. It was during his standing in for an indisposed colleague in Schubert’s Ninth Symphony in 2017 that he and the SCO fell for one another, and their recording of the work to launch his tenure two years later accordingly aroused high hopes.

Hopes that were not fully realised: reviewing that first Schubert recording (1/20), Peter Quantrill hailed Emelyanychev as ‘a musician of considerable flair and independent mind’ but found these qualities to ‘produce fitfully illuminating results in symphonic repertoire’. Now, almost five years on, Emelyanychev and the SCO return to Schubert in this coupling of the Fifth and Eighth Symphonies that once again doesn’t quite equate to the sum of its parts.

Partly this is a matter of orchestral distribution, partly one of balance. What PQ identified as ‘a compact bass line … too discreet for its own good’ doesn’t provide the grounding so essential to the opening Allegro moderato of the Unfinished, a movement founded upon and anchored to its opening cellos-and-basses motif. Woodwind, too, recede in the balance (though not as catastrophically as in Emelyanychev’s Jupiter Symphony with Il Pomo d’Oro – Aparté, 4/23) such that the thrum of the motor – Schubert’s characteristically insistent string figuration – is foregrounded at the expense of the melodic focus. Nevertheless, the warmth of the combined woodwind-and-brass sonority contrasts with the straight-toned strings, which can feel a little undercooked in comparison. Then there is the plainness of the phrasing: trace the work from the opening motif up to the first climax in recent recordings by, for example, Heinz Holliger or René Jacobs – each offering an individual take on small-band Schubert – and in both cases lines are inflected with a deal more personality such that the music is made to feel as if something that truly matters has transpired. Whereas those recordings shape that opening paragraph as if to relate something of supreme importance, the new one does little more than develop from single line to a climax over a period of a minute or so.

This efficient, no-nonsense approach suits the sunnier Fifth far better, communicating the eagerness of the music without going to extremes of tempo, and the A major Rondo is a delightful, unexpected makeweight, dispatched with aplomb by leader Stephanie Gonley. But the Unfinished shows once more that when it comes to the weightier, later works, Emelyanychev’s Schubert is not yet the finished product.