While marginally beefed up from their recent recording of the Emperor Concerto (3/20), the Freiburg Barockorchester field a string section of 9.8.6.5.4 for this Ninth: smaller than the forces deployed for early performances including the premiere, and sounding even fewer than their numbers in this wind-centric production.

There is profit and loss involved – agility in negotiating Beethoven’s precipitate metronome markings offset by a disordered hierarchy of voicing that muzzles the bass and trains the focus on subsidiary figures – but I’m not sure the balance sheet adds up, even for period-instrument devotees. From Antonini to Zinman, many historically informed, metronome-positive Ninths enjoy a more humane balance of instruments, to say nothing of a sense of occasion: what are we to make of a slow movement where the sublime Andante theme is not so much punctuated as punctured by its horn-and-pizzicato accompaniment?

Even the finale is cut down to size, with a small chorus boasting superbly articulate diction and a quartet of fine soloists apparently encouraged to sound as rustic as possible: I’m reminded of Thomas Adès’s insight, interviewed in the May issue, that there is a seditiously open-air quality to its sequence of episodes, its popular songs and hymns, but where is the rabble to be roused? The Harmonia Mundi engineers have skilfully simulated the impression of a barn filled by a pitchfork- and piccolo-wielding mob.

Friends, not these sounds: the Berlin studio acoustic lends a more sympathetic glow to the opening section of the Choral Fantasy, and I enjoyed the palette of colours that Kristian Bezuidenhout draws from his instrument. (Is it the same Graf fortepiano to be heard on his recent Emperor Concerto? The booklet doesn’t say.) All the same, I found his rhetorical dips and pauses a little mannered compared to Robert Levin (12/96), who brings the composer splendidly to life, at once imperious and mischievous. His conductor, John Eliot Gardiner, also plays a dynamic part in shaping every line without affectation. On its most recent reissue (3/20), their Archiv recording was conveniently coupled with Gardiner’s Ninth (11/94), which for all its obstreperous corners now sounds a model of sensitivity by the side of Heras-Casado.