Klaus Tennstedt’s reading of Beethoven’s Coriolan Overture is typically measured and full-bodied, freighted with meaning. And the recording, made live in London’s Royal Festival Hall in February 1992, is pleasingly clean and immediate. The recording of the Fifth Symphony, made in the Royal Albert Hall during a Henry Wood Promenade concert two years earlier, is comparably robust, though the hall’s morgue-like acoustic does odd things to the LPO horns in the opening movement.

That said, it is an acoustic which is not unsuited to a performance that has its own burdens to bear. Tennstedt’s keenness to deploy the old Romantic trick of turning the symphony’s opening four-note motif (‘Fate knocking at the door’) into an ever more minatory motto as the movement progresses is evidence of this. The slow movement has at times the air of a funeral cortege. And though neither the Scherzo nor the finale labours rhythmically, both labour spiritually. Only in the final furlong, as Beethoven accelerates towards his looked-for consummation, does Tennstedt make a pitch for glory. Even so, it is impossible to think of this as being in any way a triumphalist Fifth.

Listening to the performance, I was reminded of Michael Tippett’s remark in ‘Prefaces to Verses for a Symphony’ about the failure over the last two centuries of the utopian dream which motivated Schiller (and, by devolution, Beethoven) in his ‘Ode to Joy’. ‘When we occasionally celebrate, as we must and if we can, we do so from a deeper need and with a sharper pang.’ I guess Tennstedt would have said ‘Amen’ to that.