It would be difficult to find an odder Beethoven cycle than this. A mish-mash of Berlin Philharmonic and Bavarian RSO recordings from the 1950s, it first appeared as a seven-LP ‘cycle’ in 1959. For consistency’s sake, the LPs were presented in mono even though the First, Second, Fifth and Eighth symphonies existed in up-to-date stereo recordings. The new set mixes mono and stereo, though for some unexplained reason Jochum’s 1956 Berlin recording of the Fourth has been replaced by one which post-dates the set’s original release.

The recordings are revealed to be of generally good pedigree by remasterings which manage to juxtapose mono and stereo sources discreetly and well. Where there are problems with the sound they are largely of the conductor’s making: detached and exaggerated bass lines in the mono recordings, exaggerated dynamics and capricious balances passim. To take just one example, the opening of the Fourth Symphony (Berlin, 1961) sounds so remote you’ll probably think the transfer engineers have failed to match the levels between this and the splendid 1958 Berlin Second which precedes it. Once we arrive at the Allegro vivace, however, the levels are fine; it’s Jochum and his original balance engineer who have blundered.

Since Jochum was too practised and inspirational a conductor not to have his moments where Beethoven is concerned, it would just about be possible with the aid of selective illustration to suggest that this was the set of the century. The finale of the Seventh Symphony (mono 1952) or the ‘Shepherds’ Song of Thanksgiving’ from the Pastoral (mono 1956) would be good examples to choose. The Seventh, a Jochum speciality, is pretty good throughout but the Pastoral is a write-off, subverted by the slow, mannered, and insufficiently contrasted playing of the first two movements.

At their worst – the whole of the 1954 Berlin Eroica, parts of the 1952 Munich Ninth and moments in the 1959 Munich Fifth – the readings struck me as being pretentious and immature, Jochum glossing Beethoven’s music with melodramatically drafted footnotes of his own devising. As the years pass, so the ‘interventions’ decrease. A splendidly robust 1958 Berlin Eighth still has its fair share of egregious underlining. In the 1961 Fourth, by contrast, the manipulation is mainly structural and largely confined to the first movement.

Since the point of this new ‘Original Masters’ series appears to be the revival of what are alleged to be much loved but unaccountably forgotten recordings, I looked out the original Gramophone reviews to see if they had been heard with kindlier ears. Not a bit of it. I found William Mann (reviewing the Second Symphony) complaining of ‘rhythmic articulation that lapses from extreme rigidity into unsteadiness without a moment’s warning’ and Deryck Cooke (reviewing the Pastoral) open-mouthed at conducting that ‘moves naively from one tempo to another according to the changing mood of the music’. Astonished to find a conductor of Jochum’s experience speeding up in loud music and slowing down for the quieter bits, Cooke sighed: ‘If only he would bring to bear on Beethoven the straightforward Classical method he uses for the symphonies of Haydn!’

The overtures don’t fare much better. The over-reverberant Herkules-Saal acoustic compromises the more youthful pieces and Jochum’s wayward conducting of Leonore No 2 is further proof of Mann’s contention that Jochum tends to make Beethoven seem Weberish, Schumannesque or Mendelssohnian. Anything but Beethovenian.

The accompanying essay does its best to make a ‘case’ for Jochum’s Beethoven but, like the conducting, it’s something of a muddle, riddled with half-truths, non sequiturs and high-flown German gobbledegook. In the end, the performances disappoint not because they offer ‘Romanticised’ Beethoven but because unlike, say, Furtwängler’s Beethoven, they are long on gesture, short on a proper analytical understanding of how the music functions symphonically.