Embarking for the first time on his journey through all of Schubert’s eight symphonies with these exciting, theatrical accounts of two of the composer’s teenage essays in the genre, René Jacobs returns, as he tells us, to one of his favourite composers as a boy soprano. “So many years later I return to my first love – as a conductor. I discover another Schubert, yet love him as much as I did the first one.”

Jacobs’ reputation as a conductor rests on his expertise in opera, especially those of Mozart. His detailed commentaries on each movement of Schubert’s Symphonies 1 in D Major (1813) and 6 in C Major (1818) therefore make constant comparisons between...