The qualities that have distinguished Osmo Vänskä’s Minneapolis Beethoven cycle are very much in evidence in this final disc of the series. The coupling of the Second and Seventh symphonies points up what Rob Cowan has called Vänskä’s ability to “focus the music’s rhythmic profile with unwavering control”. Not that the performances are control-orientated. Even where the metronomes are good and speed is of the essence, as in the finale of the Second Symphony, quickness does not preclude ease.

In the Seventh Symphony, Vänskä keeps the harmonic drama in as sharp a focus as the rhythmic. The pulse may be quicker, the sound tauter, but the epic first movement breathes here much as Klemperer would have allowed it to breathe. With Vänskä, old insights are not necessarily invalid insights. In the Allegretto and third-movement Trio there is a reversion, not to old-fashioned Teutonic slowness, but to thoughtful tempi that are on the measured side of quick.

What is truly outstanding here is the transparency of the texturing and the meticulous integration of phrase shape and accent within the rhythmic continuum. Everything is audible but since Vänskä is not a didactic conductor nothing is italicised or underlined. That said, the violins’ extraordinarily precise articulation of the Second Symphony’s notorious seventh bar, with its arch of double-dotted trilled quavers and interior grace notes, may shock collectors used to the old pre-Bärenreiter fudges.

The BIS recording has exceptional clarity, with finely judged reverberation times, and a dynamic range that catches every gradation of the orchestra’s scrupulously judged sound profile right down to pianissimi of quite astonishing beauty and restraint.