In a useful accompanying documentary, Claudio Abbado admits that his Beethoven style has evolved over time. He now places much more emphasis on issues of textual fidelity, looks for proportional relationships between tempi, and of course he takes every repeat. That said, some things don’t change. Where Sir Simon Rattle, Abbado’s successor in Berlin, is designedly provocative with his mix-and-match, Furtwängler-meets-Sir Roger Norrington approach to Beethoven, the suave civility and immaculate finish of Abbado’s music-making has survived the move towards chamber-sized instrumental forces (strikingly so in the Fourth) and the advent of swifter speeds.

Unsurprisingly, it is the earlier work that responds best to his Mendelssohnian new broom. The interpretation isn’t strikingly original – the dapper finale was pressed just as hard by Karajan in his prime and Monteux in his Indian summer – but there is real joy in the playing and the audience sense this too. While the Seventh has similar virtues, its ‘slow’ introduction gives fair warning that there will be less cut and thrust than you might be used to: it is a thing of long, lithe, immaculately tailored phrases, and slow no longer. The finale goes like the wind in pursuit of a truly ecstatic lift-off in the closing stages. Even so, a few subversive rough edges wouldn’t have come amiss. Isn’t this the Mediterranean version of what one of my colleagues referred to somewhat venomously as ‘Zinman-bland’? It comes perilously close.

In No 7 alone, TDK gives us an additional ‘multi-angle’ option, which offers the purchaser a more or less fixed, musician’s-eye perspective on the conductor himself as an alternative to the usual sectional close-ups and distant overviews. Abbado watchers will find this both instructive and quite possibly distressing given the parlous state of his health at the time. The ubiquity of various species of white flower in Rome’s Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia may or may not distract, posing the old question about looking at as opposed to listening to purely orchestral concerts on DVD – is this what the new medium is for? In his review of the (separately recorded) audio equivalents (DG, 1/01), Richard Osborne wrote sagely of the way Abbado’s influx of new blood has deracinated the Berlin Philharmonic and made it into ‘a kind of glorified Chamber Orchestra of Europe’. Here one has visual confirmation that the average age of the performers is well below what might have been expected in the good old, bad old days. The total package tells us a great deal about the realities, the strengths and the weaknesses, of contemporary music-making at the very highest level.