‘Lean of tone and impetuous’ is how Richard Wigmore described Antonello Manacorda’s coupling of Schubert’s Third and Eighth symphonies with the period instrumentalists of his Potsdam Chamber Academy (Sony, 10/12). It’s a phrase I was happy to purloin when describing his next disc in the cycle, a coupling of the Fifth and Sixth symphonies where the Sixth – Schubert’s so-called ‘Little’ C major – responded rather better than the Fifth to his fresh, incisive, at times bullish approach to Schubert’s music (Sony, 7/13).

In early chamber-orchestra Schubert cycles under conductors such as Menuhin and Denis Vaughan, the Great C major generally ended up a touch underpowered. Abbado changed all that with his 1987 Chamber Orchestra of Europe recording, and Manacorda – a former leader of Abbado’s Mahler Chamber Orchestra – brings a similar weight and power to this latest performance. The reading also reflects that Italianate approach to Schubert to which I referred last month when reviewing Abbado’s posthumously released 2011 account of the symphony with his Orchestra Mozart.

In Manacorda’s performance, the last two movements are superbly done, the first two rather less so. The slow movement never quite sings as it should; it is all a touch dry, the marche militaire mood very much to the fore. (Has the horn’s knell before the march’s return even been more plainly stated?). This is frustrating given the excellence of the Potsdam ensemble both collectively and in terms of the quality of much of the solo playing.

In the first movement Manacorda races into the Allegro ma non troppo like a Ferrari accelerating down a slip road, except that the pace drops back at the second subject and then drops back further for what is an undeniably imaginative treatment of the trombones’ quietly awesome entry 65 bars later. It’s an unusual way of conducting the exposition and one that’s badly upended when the initial surge comes rocketing back with the exposition repeat. In the finale, where Manacorda doesn’t observe the exposition repeat, the tempo is much better: a perfectly judged Allegro vivace.

Earlier recordings in this series were made in Potsdam. For the Great C major, the orchestra has moved to Berlin’s Jesus-Christus-Kirche, whose bright, clean acoustic is as effective here as it was back in 1962, when Karajan’s Berlin Beethoven cycle won global recognition for the venue with performances that were also ‘lean of tone and impetuous’.