The logistics of the undertaking are ominous: a full-size symphony orchestra, transplanted, with instruments, secretariat and roadies, from southern Germany to the Far East, for slightly more than two weeks. For the final weekend of the tour, they will be joined not only by four leading vocal soloists, but also by a full chorus from Munich. A total of 67 stringed instruments have made the trip (34 violins, 13 violas, 11 cellos and 9 basses), plus 23 brass instruments and a full complement of wind. Some 70 packing cases, weighing eight-and-a-half metric tonnes and covering 45 square metres of the aircraft’s hold, have required 924 separate customs forms to be filled in. It’s all worth almost three million euros apparently. Nor is this just ‘any’ orchestra. In 2008, Gramophone placed the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra sixth in the world, ahead of numerous (far) more fancied competitors.

The occasion for this great odyssey is a landmark of some significance in the history of recorded music. As he approaches 70 years of age, the great Latvian-born maestro Mariss Jansons has decided to record a full set of the Beethoven symphonies on both CD and DVD. His eye is not on today’s public, but firmly on posterity. He has already recorded a full set on CD only (between 2007 and 2012), as a ‘special present’ for the people of Japan – and it’s on sale at a very reasonable price indeed in the concert-hall foyers. I am astonished to discover that Symphony No 6 was recorded, in a series of concerts, just 10 days before the orchestra flew east. Once the Tokyo series has been edited, Jansons will compare all the performances and a ‘best of both’ set will enjoy an international release.

Big in Japan

I’ve been to Japan twice before, and then, as now, I stayed at the Hotel Okura, favoured by US presidents for its proximity to their nation’s embassy and, I feel certain, at least a partial inspiration for the hotel in the film Lost in Translation. For the Bavarians, the proximity of Suntory Hall is, presumably, a more paramount consideration.

Arriving on a chilly Saturday morning, I abscond at once to the Shibuya shopping district where, in the Tower Records store, I register immediately the Japanese people’s abiding love of Western classical music. Japanese listeners are highly discriminating, venerating only the really great names, preferably those to whom great age has brought extra insight and wisdom. Entire sections are devoted to the likes of Richter, Arrau, Celibidache, Karajan, home-grown nonagenarian Takashi Asahina and my old friend Günter Wand. Now Jansons, already widely recognised and admired for his unique talents, is moving into this very special category, too.

Although a convert to recording live in concert, Jansons still demands technical excellence. Every final master must receive his imprimatur before there can be any question of a commercial release. He’s a busy man and this can take time, but no one on the commercial side of the enterprise complains. He also engages seriously with ‘patch’ sessions after each concert, all presided over by Wilhelm Meister (known to all as ‘Ton-Meister’, a gentle pun on the German for ‘producer’).

A marriage made in heaven

Unlike most international maestros, Jansons has a straightforward professional life, and he takes both of his musical directorships (in Munich and Amsterdam) very seriously indeed. His guest appearances in subscription series elsewhere are now confined to Berlin and Vienna, a level of immersion that has turned him into the leading evangelist for a new purpose-built hall in Munich. He would never countenance a project as important as this Beethoven marathon in the difficult acoustics of the BRSO’s usual home, the Gasteig, or in the Philharmonie, which everyone seems to loathe. The choice of Japan is far from arbitrary. Jansons’s father, Arvid (1914-84) played a major part in introducing Western music to Japan, and his son, who speaks of him with love and reverence, has inherited that devotion to this extraordinary country. To undertake these performances at the legendary Suntory Hall, with its remarkable combination of audience and acoustic, is evidently the perfect marriage of repertoire, environment and timing. The preparation has been (to put it mildly) thoroughgoing; for the past two years, and with particular intensity during the past five or six months, Jansons has immersed himself in all things Beethoven: ‘I am totally mad about this music,’ he informs the small group of European journalists. ‘Now, if someone asks me who is the best composer, I have to say Beethoven. In my head I know that’s not right, but emotionally I can give no other answer.’

He speaks with passion about Beethoven’s travails, saying that ‘the man was almost dead’ at the time he composed the Second Symphony, as revealed in the Heiligenstadt Testament – a text that always moves Jansons to tears. His has been a lifetime of preparation for this. He recalls an early conversation with Kurt Sanderling, a contemporary of his father: ‘I told him I always felt insecure when conducting the Sixth Symphony of Tchaikovsky and the Sixth and Ninth Symphonies of Beethoven. He said to me, “You are absolutely right, my experience is just the same”.’ Jansons’s lifelong and now clearly much-missed mentor advised the then neophyte to start work on them as soon as he could – because the earlier he started, the closer he might get to ‘cracking’ them.

Taking it all in their stride

I press Jansons a little on whether these occasions are not, perhaps, a little too pressured for all concerned, with just one performance of each piece. He doesn’t believe that there’s any negative tension between making music in the ‘here and now’ for the concert-going public, and the presence of the cameras and Mr Meister in his van down below in the car park. This would be to misunderstand the nature of the exercise, he says. ‘My intention is not to show how I, Mariss Jansons, and the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra “make Beethoven”. Absolutely not. The important thing to ask is, “Did that performance move me or not?”. The musicians are all human beings and it’s important that they’re happy to play.’ He also believes these players have a huge natural advantage, because they have no fear of microphones. On the contrary, microphones are part and parcel of their life, because everything they do is recorded.

The same unpretentious attitude informs Jansons’s approach to the thorny question of which edition to use. There is no final or absolute answer, he maintains, not least for the simple reason that Beethoven’s manuscripts (where they exist) are illegible in places. He uses the latest Bärenreiter edition as his starting point, but doesn’t treat it as gospel. For him this question, which is academic in every sense and is largely meaningless to the concert-goer, isn’t important; what really matters is the Geist, the spirit, within this ‘art of a cosmic order’. This attitude is highly refreshing, as is Jansons’s candid admission that his approach to this music has been significantly influenced by the ‘authentic’ movement. He muses, however, that that is a movement of and for its time, and that it may one day be supplanted by a new Romantic interpretative tradition. It’s impossible to tell how mischievous he’s being.

Each day consists of a morning rehearsal, an afternoon break, the concert in the evening, then a patch session in the hall after the audience has left. By the time the artists take to the stage they’ve already played the first seven symphonies on the tour, in Seoul, Kyoto or Nishinomiya, with No 8 scheduled for a one-off concert at Tokyo Bunka Kaikan prior to its performance at Suntory. Consequently, these rehearsals are not full performances, but an opportunity to blow away metaphorical cobwebs and to gauge the very special acoustic of the hall.

Jansons is deservedly renowned as a master of programming, and the grouping of the pieces in this cycle is based on a pragmatic mixture of common sense, musical logic and box-office considerations. If you think the odd-numbered symphonies outweigh the evenly numbered ones in public affection in the West, believe me, feelings are stronger in the East. All four concerts conclude with a favourite symphony featuring a fast and furious ending. The cycle is grouped as follows: No 4 and No 3; No 1, No 2, then No 5; No 6 and No 7; No 8 and No 9.

As the cycle progresses, the size of the string section increases from 40 players (12-10-8-6-4), to 50 (14-12-10-8-6), to 60 (16-14-12-10-8), with first violins at stage right, then cellos, then violas, then second violins stage left, and the basses behind the firsts and the cellos. From the beginning of the first rehearsal there’s no hint of tiredness or routine. I am struck at once by both the clarity and the beauty of those nicely variegated strings, but also by a wind ensemble that seems to draw much inspiration from young principal oboist Ramón Ortega Quero. The orchestra’s confidence in him seems to me to be symptomatic of an institution at the top of its game, enjoying the present and embracing the future with relish.

The first night of the cycle

The first evening house is full (despite a top ticket price of around £250) and the audience rapt. Although many are wearing the distinctive white masks that the Japanese don when suffering from infections of the respiratory tract, there’s scarcely a cough all evening. The short patch session afterwards is good-natured and swift. The Eroica is Jansons’s favourite of the canon, but I confess his interpretation makes me feel uneasy at first. From the outset it is unusually brisk – and the funeral march is by some margin the fastest I’ve ever heard it. During an enjoyable and enlightening chat afterwards with Daniel Harding (who’s in town to conduct a Russian programme), I begin to understand what Jansons may have been seeking to achieve: by refusing to dwell upon those Napoleonic martial rhythms, he was perhaps taking account of the composer’s furious withdrawal of his original dedication of the piece to Bonaparte. Sushi, Sapporo – bed.

The second night – plus respite

The first time I heard Jansons in the concert hall (in the late-1980s at a half-full Barbican), he began by leading the Oslo Philharmonic in Beethoven’s Second. It simply did not take flight and my parents and I had a rather desultory interval drink. The interval was followed by the most incandescent Mahler No 1 I’ve ever heard, a standing ovation and four encores, culminating in ‘Storm’ from Peter Grimes. It was the night I became ‘hooked on Mariss’, but the Beethoven symphony was certainly not a contributory factor. In the second Tokyo concert, despite the orchestra resembling in No 5 a ‘well-tuned BMW rolling out of a garage’ (to quote one of the players), it is (ironically) Symphony No 2 that’s really special – the first unqualified triumph of the cycle. All the inner rhythms catch fire, and the orchestral playing is breathtaking.

For the first time I notice much toing and froing of players between works. This cycle has been years in the making, and in Munich different soloists have played in different symphonies. In Japan, the same soloists – whom Jansons has rehearsed and who’ve played themselves into the parts – are playing in those same symphonies. The marked rotation of horn players has an additional rationale – simply to ameliorate the fatigue that comes with playing Beethoven. The orchestral soloists have decided for themselves who will play the solos in which pieces. The two concertmasters have strikingly different styles, as do the two excellent principal oboists. It all adds to this extraordinary orchestra’s virtuosity and nuanced adaptability.

The following day the players cross town for a different hall, crowd and acoustic. Much great art has been played at Tokyo Bunka Kaikan (well known to the likes of Karajan and Bernstein), but the acoustic is challenging; it’s not principally a concert hall at all, but a performance space for stage companies, with a concealed pit and a cavernous under-stage apparatus for operatic productions. The band is tired. Symphony No 8 is slightly prosaic and, on this one and only occasion, some of the woodwind and brass blending sounds a bit out in the third movement of No 7. The next day is a day off; I sense that everyone needs it.

The third night of the cycle

The penultimate concert brings the Sixth and Seventh Symphonies. What a delight it is to watch the musicians’ faces as it dawns on them that they’re part of something genuinely special. The Sixth is a revelation. Jansons doesn’t go for the ‘influenced by authentic performance’ route at all, instead coaxing out of the orchestra the most loving, songlike reading of the piece imaginable, played with genuine warmth and affection. I note the playing of oboist Quero at the heart of this lyrical wonder. I’ve never before heard such kinship between the 12/8 melody of the bucolic second movement and its rather distant cousin the Viennese waltz. It’s all like listening to the biggest, classiest chamber orchestra on earth, with lots of looks and smiles exchanged between players. This piece requires a very distinctive orchestral palette, which makes it all the more remarkable that the orchestra can produce such an explosive rendition of No 7 immediately afterwards. My money is firmly on Nos 2, 6 and 7 from Tokyo finding their way into the final box-set, however good the Munich recordings may be.

The climax

On Friday morning the chorus members arrive from Bavaria. If they’re jet-lagged they certainly don’t show it. The morning rehearsal takes place before an invited audience of students, commencing with Jansons taking the cellos and basses through the opening section of the finale of the Ninth, with no other players on stage. Given the sheer quality of playing of these two string sections, this kind of focus seems excessive, but there’s no implied criticism, and in the context of the performance it all makes perfect sense.

Beethoven himself made this work ‘programmatic’ by adding the explicit references to ‘diese Töne’ from earlier movements at the outset of the finale, and Jansons makes this section a very clear dialogue, or event contest, between the low strings and the rest of the orchestra. It’s all there in the score, but I’ve never before seen it all pointed up so overtly in a performance. Japanese audiences have a special love for this piece, and this performance, on December 1, effectively inaugurates an annual season – running into Christmas – of Beethoven Ninths. It seems a little unfair on those that follow.

The hand-picked quartet – Christiane Karg, Mihoko Fujimura, Michael Schade and Michael Volle – blend superbly. At the end of the concert, after the players have left the stage, Jansons has two curtain- calls to himself. Ever the perfectionist, the Ton-Meister asks thrice for a patch of the ‘Alle Menschen’ quartet. In the third take, not for the first time on this tour, the magic strikes. For the handful of us still in the hall, the poetry, the perfect intonation, the blend, balance and beauty simply take the breath away.

At dinner afterwards everyone is in high spirits, including Harding, who keeps me up to date as my football team, West Ham, equalise against European Champions Chelsea then improbably score again and again, eventually beating them 3-1. The ‘Mighty Irons’ may be obliged to focus on survival rather than on becoming world-beaters, but, on this hearing, the BRSO is more than capable of consolidating its position in the international top six. I agree with what both Jansons and Harding, quite separately, say to me on this trip: this is an orchestra capable of playing anything, in any style, to the highest standard.

At the end of this tour I’ve never wanted less to be a critic. Sometimes a combination of repertoire, location and artists creates a rare alchemy that renders criticism otiose, fatuous and simply inappropriate. Jansons and his band have something valid and fresh to say in every single symphony, so the cycle is far more than the sum of its parts. I’ve intensely and intensively revisited the ‘Beethoven nine’, which I regard as collectively one of the greatest achievements of Western civilisation, and shared that journey with artists of the highest order and the most appreciative audience I’ve ever encountered – all half a world away from home.

If there was a single musical high point for me, it came not in a concert but afterwards. The opening of Symphony No 1 had been marred by some almost imperceptible imperfections of ensemble and intonation.

None of it much mattered in the moment; but posterity is a more demanding mistress. In the ensuing patch session, the orchestra replayed that section, leaping out of the trap full of energy and radiance. It sounded like what it is – the bracing beginning of an extraordinary journey that ends with the Ode to Joy. There was a moment’s silence – they all knew they’d hit the bullseye this time; then the Ton-Meister said, ‘Alles Klar’, which means both ‘all clear’ and ‘everything is clear’. It’s all been, as John Le Mesurier might have said, really rather lovely.

Click here to subscribe to the Gramophone Archive, featuring every page of every issue of Gramophone since April 1923