Past a sonorous first chord, the rhetorically moulded opening to Egmont may take the unwary listener by surprise, but the score indicates Sostenuto, ma non troppo, and Marcus Bosch convincingly relates it to the Overture’s main argument as a recitative-like up-beat in the manner of the introduction to the Seventh Symphony, a mere eight opus numbers away. There is a muscular discipline to his Beethoven that I enjoy very much, and a dramatic imperative that points up the restless syncopations of the main Allegro before a theatrical arrest for the unique double cadence at the Overture’s climax: the guillotine’s fall and then the imagined dawn and popular uprising of the coda. The occluded piccolo fails to register, but it’s an error in the right direction, you might say.

The same imperative punctuates the almost suffocating intensity of Coriolan with some bold drum swells, and presses relentlessly through the coda where even Beethoven interpreters of iconoclastic and revolutionary inclination from Scherchen to Zinman have relaxed the pulse and expanded the expressive horizon to paint the hero’s demise in tragic tones. Indeed, by the side of Bosch, many interpreters old and new sound comparatively fussy or laboured: try him blowing the cobwebs away in The Consecration of the House.

Dynamically articulated and imaginatively recorded as they are here, snare, rattle and drums supply quite sufficient din of battle to Wellington’s Victory without recourse to artificial tricks. Anyone still entertaining a low opinion of Beethoven’s highly profitable pièce d’occasion should give Marcus Bosch a try as well as digging out the rehearsal sequence for the recording of the piece marshalled by Scherchen (DG, A/20).

As for the rest of Egmont, Frederic Böhle is an engagingly conversational and comparatively youthful mediator between us and the music, filling us in on Goethe’s story through a modern filleting of the texts prepared by Mosengeil and further edited by Grillparzer (one wonders if there is any Goethe left). In her unaffected way Raffaela Lintl lends Clärchen’s two solos an unusual seriousness of purpose, but this is a hallmark of all three volumes in what has become a definitive modern edition of Beethoven’s music for the stage.