The Vienna Philharmonic gave this concert a little over a year after Simon Rattle had recorded the nine symphonies for EMI. The experience should have stood them in good stead; in the event, Harnoncourt made more radical demands. Less in terms of sonority – here is recognisably the same orchestra, or at least the same instruments, that played the Seventh in Furtwängler’s final concert at the Salzburg Festival almost half a century earlier – than of articulation. Rattle searches for a legato to knit together the three opening statements of the Seventh’s introduction. Harnoncourt gives each one its own space. Cantabile is parsimoniously reserved for second themes and trios.

Few listeners who prize Norrington or Fricsay in the First will warm to this one, though Harnoncourt has a Haydnesque trick up his sleeve with the Andante, which creeps in as stealthily as a worker late to his desk, and continues with an ingenuous air – ‘Who, me?’ – before gravely turning to more serious matters in the minor-key development. The cartoonish exaggeration of the finale, between staccato and legato, forte and piano, would make it a perfect replacement for whichever Czech pickup band played it to announce each episode of Ludwig, the ’70s animated series starring a robotic egg.

In the monumental, often austere effect of these performances, the acoustic of the festival’s Felsenreitschule must play its part. The radio microphones do not pick up every last moving part so scrupulously as the engineers for the live recorded cycles by Harnoncourt and Rattle, both working in more sympathetic Austrian acoustics.

The Seventh leaves a much stronger impression. Harnoncourt ferrets out a Schubertian ostinato from the inner strings at the climax of the exposition; indeed, the whole symphony is played as a precursor of the Great C major, with an Allegretto of ever-deepening pathos, not a whit less gripping than Furtwängler, rhythmically much steadier than Rattle. As in many Eroica performances, the tension is never fully dispelled by the expulsion of energy in the Scherzo and finale; they bring the fewest surprises, though they do not speak of routine, rather a happy accommodation of independent minds. Applause is retained, and deservedly so.