Sir John Eliot Gardiner directs a more or less exemplary account of Beethoven’s Second Symphony. The outer movements are swift-moving without being overdriven; textures are lean, detail is pertinent. An exquisitely judged account of the lyric slow movement and a properly weighted reading of the Scherzo complete one’s pleasure. The reading is similar to Gardiner’s earlier one with the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique (Archiv, 11/94). The principal difference, aside from extensive changes of orchestral personnel, is that the performance was recorded live in Cadogan Hall. This boasts a cleaner, less reverberant acoustic than the Great Hall in Blackheath which was used for the 1991 studio recording. The end of the Cadogan Hall performance electrifies as the earlier one didn’t quite do and there is a marginally more easeful way with the introductory Adagio.

Gardiner’s high-speed performance of the Eighth Symphony is less of a success. The players gabble the quavers in the opening four-bar summons, to which Gardiner now adds an unmarked diminuendo on the final uprush – as odd as an actor dropping his voice at the end of the opening line of John Donne’s ‘Busie old foole, unruly Sunne’. Such details notwithstanding, the outer movements show Gardiner at his most remorseless. The second movement is wittily done but elsewhere there appears to be scant recognition of the fact that this mighty symphony is essentially a work of comic genius, the Dionysiac Seventh’s jesting stablemate. Having given this hard-driven affair a couple of hearings, I took down from the shelves Sir Thomas Beecham’s 1951 RPO recording of the Eighth (Columbia, 9/53). Now there’s a performance.