Trevor Harvey in these pages once described Schumann-conducting as ‘a department of conducting all on its own, needing a judgement that can only come from an inborn sympathy with, and love for, the composer’. He was reviewing Josef Krips’s 1956/57 recordings of the First and Fourth Symphonies (2/58); others might draw Kubelík or Sawallisch into the same ‘department’. Recently a number of further applications have been received – Luisi, Paavo Järvi, Dausgaard, Holliger among others – and the latest is from Schønwandt and the (now defunct) Netherlands Radio Chamber Philharmonic.

Schønwandt’s Schumann breathes similar air to Holliger’s, whose first instalment Rob Cowan reviewed in the last issue: freedom from portentousness and unwarranted indulgence was a characteristic identified there and the same applies here, along with the crystal clarity that comes with surround-sound recording. What we are presented with is the symphony cycle but with Schumann’s original version of what became the Fourth in 1851, dishonestly announced on the CD packaging as ‘Symphony No 4 in D minor, Op 120 (1841)’. Schønwandt is perhaps more dynamic and reactive than Holliger in, for example, the First’s finale; and in fact the only place where he appears to get bogged down is in the Second’s finale, where he doesn’t quite manage to spring the bass-line with quite the panache demonstrated by Abbado on his recent disc or Daniel Harding at last summer’s Proms. The two discs are filled up with a recent orchestration of one of Schumann’s fugues on Bach’s name and the unfinished Zwickau Symphony.

If you are in the market for a chamber-scale performance of these four works in up-to-the-minute sound, you’ll not go far wrong with these, at medium price. Holliger, however, appears to be embarking on a cycle which, in including the Overture, Scherzo and Finale, (Op 52) on its first volume, already promises more music than Schønwandt. Also on a chamber scale and in surround sound are the three discs by the Swedish Chamber Orchestra under Thomas Dausgaard, which contain both versions of the Fourth as well as Op 52, the Zwickau and a collection of overtures – personal favourites among recent Schumann recordings. However, the tantalising prospect of cycles from Yannick Nézet-Séguin and Robin Ticciati may yet be worth waiting for. Even so, it remains a matter of individual listeners’ preference whether not just love for the composer but genuine affection for the music can be discerned in those older recordings by Krips, Sawallisch, Kubelík et al.