The ‘Beethoven 2020’ compilers at DG have made a left-field choice in their inclusion of the Egmont music from Claudio Abbado’s 1995 New Year’s Eve concert in Berlin rather than the classic VPO/Szell recording. Bruno Ganz catches the right tone of noble fury in the Melodrama but elsewhere his part is cut to ribbons. When he devised his narrative condensation of Goethe’s text, Friedrich Mosengeil envisaged it in the character of declamation pieces for listeners familiar with the play, ‘and who are therefore satisfied with a sketch for the living evocation of the main moments’. Beethoven’s entr’actes only tell a story if we know what that story is in the first place.

Quite why Franz Grillparzer was prevailed upon to make a partial revision of Mosengeil’s text remains open to question – the heavy hand of Vienna’s censors may be responsible as much as any aesthetic impetus – but this is the version recorded by Matti Salminen and Leif Segerstam. Grillparzer and Salminen certainly set the scene of 16th-century Brussels more dramatically than either Mosengeil’s doggerel or Segerstam’s battleship-grey account of the Overture. Kaisa Ranta invokes Leonore in her pair of songs and the entr’actes smoulder rather than blaze (as they do under Szell or Aapo Hakkinen – Ondine, A/19), weighted with iron (like Salminen’s voice) by Segerstam’s pacing and the bass heavy recording.

Where Segerstam’s grand manner comes into its own is in some tantalising fragments of Beethoven in ceremonial and elegiac vein, including an abandoned prelude to the second act of Leonore and his orchestration of the ‘funeral march on the death of a hero’ within the Piano Sonata Op 26. Naxos is to be commended for including the full text and translation of Egmont, as well as recording Franz Beyer’s orchestral reconstruction of the Six Minuets, WoO10, whereas other ‘complete Beethoven’ labels have made do with Beethoven’s piano reductions. The minuets date from 1796 and are no more trivial for being light music than Mozart’s late sets of German dances.

Segerstam leads nicely pointed accounts of the minuets, the second of them familiar to any viewer of Fawlty Towers. He cultivates an unfashionably rounded sonority from the strings of the Turku Philharmonic, but the songful ease and elegant phrasing of his dance-music conducting here and in the complete Creatures of Prometheus may confound some expectations. The solo harp and cello number in Act 2 is beautifully done; and anyone who does not require the panoply of period sonorities on offer from, say, Armonia Atenea (Decca, A/14) will find no cause for complaint.

Warren Lee is a young Hong Kong-based pianist who talks engagingly on a promotional video about the composer’s transcription of the complete Prometheus score; the booklet is silent on the matter. Unlike Brahms, however, Beethoven often undertook such jobs as little more than hackwork, an impression not countered by a close and unfavourable piano recording from Naxos. On a recent Heritage Records album (9/18), Leslie Howard made a considerably stronger case for the transcription as a work in its own right with a lighter touch and springy articulation.