Listen to the Scherzos and Minuets of the first four symphonies. They fairly spring out of the blocks with a muscular tension that brooks no obstacle or opposition, the orchestra a perfectly weighted body in total control of its limbs and members. The first two symphonies in toto bristle with danger, wit and surprise. Why are these qualities signally lacking from the rest of the set? You won’t understand how the Eroica’s first movement can last almost 20 minutes until you reach the start of the development section. By the time we reach its climax, the point of its crushing dissonance has been lost. If Beethoven crossed a Rubicon with the Third – and if he knew he did – then he pulled on seven-league boots to trudge the rest of the way.

Please let’s forget facile comparisons with great and grand maestros of old. Except for the occasional blatant homage such as the eight-second pause before the ‘Ode to Joy’ theme, these are not throwback recordings. If you respect tradition, Thielemann noted at his recent admission to honorary membership of the Royal Academy of Music, you will renew it – and in a personal way. It’s all the more disappointing, then, to find that most of these performances seem contrived as a luxuriously appointed bulwark against feared forces of change and dogma. Momentum, when gained, is continually arrested. Second subjects and cadences arrive with the condescending turn and leathery creak of a man of parts after dinner who, having held forth for a while, gestures and enquires, ‘And what do you think, young man?’

The concert films show an orchestra in happy union with its conductor, powerful and agile as we’d expect, though too often caught out (more obviously on CD) when Thielemann’s accentuation of a line, usually a bass line, creates two simultaneous tempi, as in the finales of the Fifth and Seventh. Those are not so heavily marked as on his 1996 recordings for DG, but sleek sensibility isn’t an adequate substitute for raw conviction in this music. Anyway, there are enough moments of imprecise chording and articulation to rule out the set for those who are more exercised by technical slips on repeated listening than interpretative mannerisms, which are legion. When Mahler bawled out this orchestra and told them that tradition was just laziness, he knew his target.

The set of hour-long documentaries for each symphony is a lot of pie and not many cherries. I find it telling that Thielemann is most animated when discussing Beethoven’s influence on Strauss and Wagner: in performance, the Ninth’s Scherzo is more Fasolt than Fafner. The horn calls that give such a kick to Böhm’s recording have gone missing, and so has the B-section repeat in the first half of the movement. You don’t need the conductor to explain that he finds no comedy in symphonic music after you’ve heard his Eighth, ‘a friendly late farewell’, which in discussion takes a quarter of an hour to move on from the exposition of the first movement. The deterministic viewpoint cultivated by Thielemann and his interlocutor, Joachim Kaiser, sees the Fourth as ‘a beautifully composed anticlimax’. He sensibly observes that the bass ostinato in the Adagio composes a strict tempo into the music – and then ignores or forgets his aperçu in performance, disastrously so in the perfumed exchange of scales between the winds at the movement’s turning point. ‘To do nothing requires 150 per cent concentration,’ remarks Thielemann and, sad to say, they do it very well. To remember Carlos Kleiber’s whining but winning insistence on ‘The-rese, The-rese’ in the illicit rehearsal tape exhumed for Robert Dornhelm’s documentary is to be reminded that the past really is another country, even in Vienna.