By chance, while reviewing Pablo Heras-Casado’s new Mendelssohn disc, I happened to catch a broadcast of him conducting the San Francisco Symphony in the Scottish Symphony. The interpretation was naturally fairly similar: a straight-down-the-middle approach, not setting out to score points off the music. Nevertheless, the comparison between that and this new disc demonstrated the point of recording these ever-popular works on period instruments, bringing to them a pared-back sound world, with bouncy string basses and gently gurgling woodwinds. The broadcast, with a full-fat band, also seemed (at least on the kitchen radio) more outgoing. There’s a sense here, especially in the Scottish, that he’s holding back; and yes, come the more contrapuntally involved or more descriptive passages, it’s as if he’s suddenly let the players off the leash and the whole thing shifts into a higher gear.

Heras-Casado and his musicians spin an atmosphere in the Scottish that would make Walter Scott proud – you could imagine them being the Fort William Baroque Orchestra rather than the Freiburg. They build a slow movement of gathering intensity, just as they do in the religious procession of the corresponding movement of the Italian. Here the mists part and the Mediterranean sun glints through the textures (although, for an opposing view, sample Thomas Fey’s reading of the work on Hänssler Classic – altogether more troubled, as if he imagined Mendelssohn had visited Italy during a series of rainstorms). Nevertheless, again Heras-Casado seems happiest in slower music, falling just shy of locating the sense of unbridled joy that, for example, John Eliot Gardiner brings to his Italian (DG, 5/99).

There’s lots of Mendelssohnian activity at the moment, with symphonic explorations in various stages of completion by both Gardner (Chandos) and Gardiner (LSO Live), among others. There’s much to enjoy here, though, and the major selling-point is the wonderful sound made by this German band under their Spanish conductor.