Anyone in Beethoven’s orchestral world who ventures beyond the well-travelled symphonic trail has some remedial work to do – first in assembling appropriate pieces in a sensible context, then in trying to make them not sound like symphonies. For the 11th volume in his survey of the composer’s complete output with the Swedish Chamber Orchestra, the Danish conductor Thomas Dausgaard offers Beethoven’s only major ballet score as well as a pair of his early collections of dances.

Past recordings of The Creatures of Prometheus essentially gave listeners a choice between Charles Mackerras’s crystalline clarity with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra’s rhythmic ebullience. Dausgaard more or less splits the difference. Like Mackerras, he hauls a bit of historically informed performance practice into the modern mainstream. Like the Orpheus, he makes it abundantly clear that this is a dance piece. No one would ever place Creatures at the top of Beethoven’s catalogue, yet the programmatic narrative never runs counter to the compositional language, nor does a visual element seem missing in the music.

Beethoven’s early dances, on the other hand, are a rather different case. One could contest the claim that Vivaldi rewrote the same concerto 500 times but Beethoven clearly fashioned his 12 Menuets, WoO7, with a cookie-cutter in hand. That’s not to say they all sound alike – the first three and the final dance in particular do stand out – but midway through the set you can practically hum along even on a first listening.

In craft alone, his 12 German Dances, WoO8, are on a higher plane, his scoring for winds more graceful and fluid. His polyphony and syncopation, too, have a clear Beethovenian charm but it is to Dausgaard’s great credit that he neither condescends nor elevates the material beyond its station.

A general problem with Beethoven cycles is that, rather than tracing his musical development, too many First Symphonies sound much like his Ninth. Instead of the mature composer looking backwards, Dausgaard wisely gives us the precocious student of Haydn. Listen between the bar-lines, though, and you can still hear traces of the great symphonist to come.