Out-and-out vibrato-less string tone from the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie accentuates how Beethoven begins nearly all his major overtures with a note (mostly unison) that has no sense of pulse; offers no clue as to the harmony or more importantly rhythm of what will ensue; presents a Dogme-style bare stage in sound. It’s a fine trick. Paavo Järvi is relentlessly alive to the setting of the play overtures, in which the dominant mode of expression is terse and tense and loud to match their subjects of embodied heroism and personal failure, and the function is to grab the audience by their necks where an opera overture entices them with hints of what’s to come. Arriving at this realisation with the help of friends may account for Beethoven’s reluctant abandonment of tweaks to Leonore for the E major flourish of Fidelio’s curtain-raiser.

Though short measure, the disc can hardly be listened to in one sitting; it functions as an overture of its own to a complete Fidelio, which should be nothing if not exhilarating. The stopped horns from afar in bar 30 of Coriolan are perfectly judged; quieter than Norrington’s trailblazer, more exactly placed than the orchestra’s recording with Harding. Järvi is so combative from the off that he can find no extra force for the tragic denouement, whereas Prometheus and Egmont travel further, and perhaps their music does too.

This is less a recording for enjoyment than confrontation with uncomfortable truths, and with a timpanist freed from punctuating cadence points to create his own part in the drama. He is surely too aggressive for the suspended dissonant sequences in Fidelio’s introduction, stealing the limelight from the clarinet, but more discreet for the symphonic canvas of Leonore No 3. Welcome relief from shrill piccolos and counterpunching bass arrives with a more conventionally spirited account of The Consecration of the House – though for some of us, the broad and serene good humour of Klemperer’s EMI recordings may always hold sway here.