Robin Ticciati & SCO - Schumann: The Symphonies - The Times

In the world's eyes, 2014 has been Robin Ticciati's Glyndebourne year: since January, this flaming young conductor has been the opera festival's music director. But north of the border they view Ticciati differently: he's the conductor of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra. The music-making on this splendid album gives abundant evidence of a happy marriage: you don't get playing this focused and vigorous if everyone's in a bad mood.

The repertoire suits them, too. After two successful albums of Berlioz, they have turned to the four symphonies of Schumann - the 19th century's other leading tortured romantic composer, with a tortured personal life to suit. He also shared Berlioz's gift of writing music capable of working critics into a lather. "Disorder", "an affectation of originality", "harmonies . . . obtrusively crude": those were some of their first descriptions.

We listen now with different ears, helped in part by the orchestra's modest size in these live recordings from Perth Concert Hall. At the orchestra's fullest, in the revised version of Symphony No 4, we hear 54 musicians beavering away with clarity and bounce - the perfect complement to restless music never content with the accepted patterns of symphonic thought. Listening to this release, no one could cling to another ancient complaint about Schumann: that he orchestrated badly. Muddy textures? Difficulties of balance? Not in these lithe accounts, dancing with subtly changing colours, from the antiphonal comments of winds and strings to those horns that rise over Schumann's musings like morning sun breaking through mist.

Punchy rhythms, too: a particular legacy of the "historically aware" performing movement developed over the past 40 years. Fortunately, Ticciati never drives his players quite as hard as John Eliot Gardiner did in his period-instrument set of 1997, where the conductor seemed at times to be competing in Formula One. There is lilting flow here, too, plus delicate textures, from the winds especially: all ingredients in performances that make you experience the symphonies' wonders afresh. Onwards and upwards, I hope, both for Ticciati and the SCO.