Bruno Weil’s initial basic tempo, held with conviction but not rigidity through the first movement’s vicissitudes, is crotchet=78: much less headlong than Toscanini or Gardiner (or Beethoven), just up a notch from Weingartner, Abbado and Wand. In fact, much here that makes plain good sense reminded me of Wand’s recording: the lofty, Klemperer-like disdain for orchestral colour as an end in itself; the bucolic stamp of the Scherzo at, again, an almost identical tempo; the refusal to whip the finale into either a Dionysian frenzy or a Bill of Rights.

What’s special about the recording grows from the string section and in particular the violins, led by Jeanne Lamon. All these players are surely well-versed in the language of late-quartet Beethoven. Time and again, exchanging a battuta exclamations or deeply engaged in fair-minded debate, they reminded me of the inner movements of Op 130. Not so, understandably, the more neutral wind soloists, with the signal, memorably poetic exception of Tafelmusik’s first clarinet, Tindaro Capuano, and the slow movement does not rival the heights of a Cavatina played with palpable inner feeling.

The character of the finale’s cello recitative is sufficiently strong to absorb the memories of previous movements within its flow, until the full statement of the Joy theme rekindles the strength of purpose which so distinguishes the opening movement. The unsteadiness of the bass injunction suggests an attempt to project into a larger, more conventional performance, and none of the vocal soloists sounds happy in consort.

Weil’s defining statement of intent comes with the entry of the Tafelmusik Chamber Choir: all 32 of them, bravely unbuttressed by further support or much help from the microphones, which are more interested in the Turkish percussion. Soft, snarly horns emerge and all manner of felicitous instrumental life wriggles out from the texture as if a boulder had been rolled aside. Schiller’s words are not so much lost – the choral voices are professionally blended, their diction excellent – as absorbed within a larger struggle to rejoice against strong odds. A Choral Symphony this ain’t, but it has a ring of truth.