For the sixth instalment of their ‘Resound’ project – Beethoven’s orchestral works performed in the Viennese venues where they were heard during the composer’s lifetime – Martin Haselböck and his period instrument band return to the Ceremonial Hall of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, where they recorded the Seventh Symphony (Vol 2, 3/16). The auditorium’s acoustic is splendidly transparent and highly flattering to the Vienna Academy Orchestra’s robust, characterful wind- and brass-playing, although the small string section sounds comparatively anaemic.

This imbalance is particularly bothersome in the Eighth Symphony, as it mars a generally felicitous interpretation. The Allegretto scherzando is delectably light, for example, and Haselböck finds surprising sweetness beneath its mechanical surface. I like, too, how he relishes the playful rhythmic punctuation in the outer sections of the Minuet, while the Trio is ravishing, with the clarinet’s rustic piping and the horns’ lavish legato. The outer movements are rather less successful. I’ll take Haselböck’s flexible, affectionate phrasing of the opening Allegro vivace e con brio over Gardiner’s hard-driven, grim-faced account (SDG, 12/14), although Krivine (Naïve, 7/11) provides considerably more brio – indeed, his version practically bursts with joyous energy. Again, in the finale, Haselböck is simply too polite. Robert Simpson described this music as having a brilliance that ‘strikes bright sparks as a sword from a rock’, and that’s just what Krivine gives us.

The Viennese musicians make a stronger impression in the composer’s arrangement for piano of his Violin Concerto, projecting lyrical grandeur with a veritable kaleidoscope of tone colour. If the orchestral tuttis are more involving than the solo passages, that’s Beethoven’s own fault; his transcription sounds half-hearted and slapdash. Gottlieb Wallisch is a plain-spoken yet sensitive player; and in the oddly elaborate cadenzas he’s at last able to snap the music into focus. The fortepiano he’s chosen (by Franz Bayer, c1825) sounds handsome in its middle register but the upper tones are muted, so one desperately misses the violin’s radiance.