Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, Royal Festival Hall, London

Those of us who have grown up being told that Schumann didn’t know how to orchestrate, that his symphonies were “problematic” in that respect, will, on evidence of these performances, be wondering whose ears have been at fault.

Problem? What problem? The point is that since the late 19th century lovers of live music have gradually become conditioned to listening to symphonic music through a welter of string and brass sound. Textures have become thicker and more overbearing, volume and expectation of volume increased. It’s exciting what modern instruments can do, the range and beauty of sonority they now offer – but put Simon Rattle in front of a period instrument band like the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and it’s like having one’s ears syringed.

There wasn’t a single moment in either Schumann’s 2nd or 4th symphonies where one felt it was down to the conductor’s sleight of hand to ensure the clarity of inner voices. The revelations weren’t just in textural but harmonic transparency. You listened differently, more attentively, you finally heard what Schumann was about: why – in the original version of the 4th Symphony - he might pit a solo clarinet against an entire cello section in the certain knowledge that they would be complementing not competing; why his woodwind voices suddenly sounded fresher for not being embedded in but rather riding the string sound; why his brass could exult tutta forza and not completely and utterly dominate the ensemble. How exciting it was to hear the vigorous cross-winds of cellos against skirls of high woodwind in the stormy first movement development and on a more general note how much more fulfilling to hear the uplift in singing violins achieved in the phrasing as opposed to the vibrato. Vibrato is a useful expressive tool, but modern day string players rely too much on it.

In the 2nd Symphony slow movement Schumann has his violins reaching into a new age of Mahlerian heartache through some of the most poignant and romantic music he ever wrote. But the impersonal, luxuriant sheen we so often hear was gone, replaced here with a heartbreaking honesty that was so much more about the notes than the sound. And that extraordinarily stark, even bizarre, passage in the middle of the movement, where all one hears are tentative short steps in the strings, suddenly made sense: Schumann, the lost soul.