The opening salvo in Edward Gardner’s Schubert symphony edition (3/19) boded well. Its successor lives up to expectations. These are fresh, up-tempo performances of the young Schubert’s most cheerfully prolix symphonies, nimbly executed and finely recorded in the warm acoustic of Birmingham Town Hall. In Gardner’s hands the music darts and skips with youthful abandon, oblivious of any responsibilities to the future. The spirit of the ballet is ominipresent here, whether in the strings’ deft pianissimo staccato in the opening Allegro of No 2 (a notorious test of precise articulation at speed) or the dapper Haydn-meets-Rossini outer movements of No 6. Gardner’s care for texture means that the woodwind, not least the flutes, are always clearly audible in the tuttis; and the superb individual wind players savour their many moments in the spotlight: say, the carolling flute, oboe and clarinet in the Trio of No 2 – a vision of bucolic innocence – or the crisp, cheeky dialoguing in the potentially over-long finale of No 6.

In his justly admired Schubert cycle with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe (DG, 2/89), Claudio Abbado favours rather broader tempos and a more subtly moulded style of phrasing. I wouldn’t want to be without his recordings. Yet Gardner’s exuberant directness suits these two symphonies particularly well. His lusty, one-in-a-bar tempo for the Minuet in No 2 (Abbado is appreciably slower) seems spot-on, as does his gamesome Presto in the Scherzo of No 6, where Schubert cribs blatantly from both Beethoven’s First and Seventh Symphonies. The guileless Andante variations of No 2 – Schubert’s answer to Haydn’s Surprise Symphony – become a brisk stroll through the Wienerwald (Abbado is more inclined to linger en route), while No 6’s Andante has an airy balletic grace, its frolicsome wind solos deliciously pointed.

Impossible, of course, to nominate an outright winner with these much-recorded early symphonies. As ever, so much depends on taste. But if you fancy lithe, modern-instrument performances that stress the music’s coltish energy while attending to all Schubert’s colourful instrumental detail, then Gardner should fit the bill. The two overtures ‘in the Italian Style’, composed when Vienna was in the grip of Rossini fever, make an agreeably jaunty bonus, while Bayan Northcott’s note both informs and whets the appetite for the music – exactly what a booklet note should do but too often doesn’t.