The accepted view is that Beethoven’s heroic style died a heroic death in the drum-banging, flag-waving political projects he took on during the early 1810s, most notorious among them Wellington’s Victory. Reassessing that judgement for ourselves has not been easy in the absence of complete, well-prepared modern recordings, which makes Marcus Bosch’s miniseries on CPO all the more valuable beyond the pleasure in itself of a period-informed, modern-instrument band going full tilt at this music with the flair and dynamism of Harnoncourt and the Chamber Orchestra of Europe.

It would be idle to pretend we are dealing with front-rank Beethoven in the male choruses that make up the greater part of the incidental music to King Stephen, the companion drama by August von Kotzebue to The Ruins of Athens for the inauguration of the Imperial Theatre at Pest in 1812. All the same, it is good to hear them dispatched with a feel for the words and their dramatic context by the Czech Philharmonic Choir of Brno.

What most previous recordings have omitted, however, is the monodrama (oratory over orchestra) immediately preceding the final chorus which (as in the climax to Egmont) Beethoven evidently found so congenial a form. Here, too, Bosch scores over the vamp-until-ready accompaniment that Leif Segerstam conducts for Naxos as if recorded separately from the narrator (and the DG version, led by Myung-Whun Chung, which definitely is). As the eponymous king, defending Hungary’s honour against a force from the east, Bernd Tauber strikes a moving note of convinced but restrained fervour, more Attlee than Churchill. He delivers an updated but not expurgated version of Kotzebue’s text, which the booklet prints with all the precise indications Beethoven gave to indicate how words and music would heighten the impact of each other.

Some listeners may cavil at the minuet-like grace of Leonore No 3’s dungeon introduction but Bosch shares with Clemens Krauss (Decca, 9/55) a fundamentally stage-informed sense of timing (no artful pause for the offstage trumpets, for example) in the taut fidelity of his Leonore/Fidelio overtures: by comparison, Harnoncourt (Warner, 2/97) now sounds rather studied. As a sequel to The Ruins of Athens (CPO, 10/20), this could only be enhanced by the promise of a new Egmont and Der glorreiche Augenblick from the same source.