From the early days of its work with Klemperer, Wand and Rosbaud, and then the ’60s tenure of Christoph von Dohnányi, the radio symphony orchestra in Cologne has a distinguished history of Beethoven performance in the school of ‘new objectivity’ which predated the period-performance movement and has always run alongside it. Leaving the orchestra this summer after nine years in charge, Jukka-Pekka Saraste has placed his stone on that cairn with his first complete cycle of the nine symphonies.

Like his predecessors, Saraste programmes Beethoven alongside 20th-century modernists: Schoenberg, Webern, Ligeti. Unlike his more radical contemporaries, he builds a profile of the composer as a reluctant revolutionary, with a dense, post-Wagnerian body of sound built up from the solid foundations of a well-defined bass section. Saraste keeps this bass in check for the Classically proportioned members of the cycle, Nos 1, 2, 4 and 8, reducing it to three or four instruments. Divided violins cut across each other, hard-sticked timpani slice through tuttis and incisive solo winds lead the argument. The Fourth is especially impressive, alive to all the adoptions and subversions of 18th-century manners.

As the scale of Beethoven’s formal ambitions expands, however, the focus of each performance suffers. They were recorded under studio conditions in two week-long bursts, and signs of haste manifest themselves especially in the later session covering the last four symphonies through slips of ensemble and coordination. Saraste’s ‘Storm’ is much the most engaging section of an otherwise impatient and ill-balanced Pastoral. The mid-range is flooded with bass and what was dense becomes clotted. The instincts remain sound: this is thick-set if sometimes muscle-bound Beethoven of a kind more familiar half a century ago, voiced with a lively and relaxed directorial intelligence that’s much more appreciable in the concert films of the cycle available to view free of charge at the orchestra’s online media library. There, too, the recorded balance is closer and more analytical.

What I miss from the studio cycle is difference: not from competitors but one symphony from another. You would be hard-pressed to know the trombones had entered the room in the finale of the Fifth (though the piccolo certainly leaves his mark here and in the Ninth). The Scotch snap in the Scherzo of the Sixth is almost inaudible.

The Adagio of the Ninth flows along peaceably enough near the composer’s metronome mark but its momentum is arrested by the kind of rhythmic mannerisms noted by RO when he addressed Saraste’s 1988 Eroica with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra (Virgin/Erato, 10/92). There is a large but backwardly balanced chorus for the finale and an uneven quartet of soloists: the outstanding contribution comes from the bass Tareq Nazmi, whom I so admired in Currentzis’s Verdi Requiem (see page 123), and his declamation of ‘O Freunde’ suddenly demands attention in a way that too little else does in this set, for all its orthodox virtues.