Res severa gaudium (‘pleasure is a serious business’), the proscenium of the Gewandhaus stage sternly enjoins us; and, after the postmodern roisterings of Barenboim and Thielemann, it’s a considerable relief to turn to interpreters who respond first of all to the text in front of them. You could, if you wanted, discern in the motoric drive of de Vriend’s Scherzo the Welsh steam engine to which he refers in his decidedly personal take on the symphony’s context in the booklet-notes, but what one actually hears is a symphony composed in 1824 and not 1884; composed by a man used to dashing off arrangements of popular tunes but now embarking on a series of string quartets that would sum up and extend a life’s work. The adroit members of the Netherlands Symphony Orchestra adapt themselves accordingly: to horns that parp and bustle, closer to the earth than Gardiner, say, but without the blaring insensitivity of Emmanuel Krivine’s band. The intimately textured, carefully staged, unfailingly sung effect of the whole is close to the reading we might have had if Sir Charles Mackerras had retained the Scottish Chamber Orchestra for his otherwise era-defining set of the symphonies and anyone for whom Werktreue still means something valuable and self-renewing should hear it. The difference between de Vriend and Masur is encapsulated by ‘O Freunde, nicht diese Töne!’; what Theo Adam delivers with hall-filling pomposity, Geert Smits makes into an operatic scena, at first dramatically contemptuous, then persuasive and, finally, firmly exhortative.

By the side of de Vriend, Masur’s live performance, though nourished by a culture of fidelity, seems sometimes fussy, sometimes clumsy and altogether less true. Masur has his personal touches, such as a huge timpani crescendo to set the seal on the first movement, a diminuendo on the timpani irruptions of the Scherzo’s B section and an insistence on using a children’s chorus for the top line of the finale; these have palled on me after a while. The most exciting of Masur’s four available versions of the Ninth, it has been released several times and is now coupled with the original commission for the opening of the new Gewandhaus on October 8, 1981, from local composer Siegfried Thiele. Does its omnium gatherum of styles stand the test of time better than the more obvious culture clash of Japanese and European instruments in Minoru Miki’s Symphony for Two Worlds, and does either produce more than a politically attractive pièce d’occasion? I’m not convinced. But don’t miss de Vriend.