The album’s title implies some form of pioneering research but in fact indicates that Jan Vogler, Intendant of the Dresden Festival since 2008, has joined its orchestra in restringing his ‘Ex Castelbarco/Fau’ Stradivari with gut. The exercise created for Vogler ‘a whole new feeling’ and the use of period instruments and practices is, he avers, ‘the key to a world of imagination’. His instrument retains the grain of its sound, rich in its mid-range and singing plangently as the music takes the left hand up the fingerboard. There’s an occasional gruffness, too, and it’s clear that Vogler doesn’t feel the need to seek beauty of sound in Schumann’s knottier passages.

The disc’s packaging doesn’t specifically spell out that these recordings were taken live but there are a number of noises off. Nevertheless, Vogler – placed ideally against the orchestra, his sound growing naturally out of the tuttis – shows few signs of awkwardness in Schumann’s challenging writing. Another recent period-instrument recording with Jean-Guihen Queyras, the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra and Pablo Heras-Casado may be ‘cleaner’ but the two approaches are complementary, and the sense of involvement in this one is undeniably infectious.

There is more competition in the Second Symphony, both on period instruments and on modern ones played with period manners. Ivor Bolton makes the most of Schumann’s obsessive rhythms and shapes the insistent counterpoint of the finale so that the arrival of the near-quote from Beethoven’s An die ferne Geliebte seems to occur with divine inevitability, crowned by its combination with the brass fanfares from the symphony’s opening. John Eliot Gardiner and his Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique perhaps drive through this music with a greater sense of assurance but Bolton and his Dresden players make an admirable case for the troublesome Second.