Thomas Fey's avowed mission is to scotch the “Papa Haydn” image once and for all and reveal to the full “the boldness and beauty of his impassioned musical contrasts”. Think how his mentor Nikolaus Harnoncourt might conduct these three D major symphonies from around 1780, and then add some. No 70's triple-time opening Vivace sets the tone: an abrasive, incendiary performance, ferociously paced and accented, shrieking trumpets and hollering horns to the fore. As ever, the Heidelbergers play with a lean, taut brilliance and phenomenally precise articulation at speed. The magnificent first movement of No 75 is in similar vein, the tempo on the edge of the possible, the repeated-note accompaniments quivering with neurotic energy, the tuttis exploding with hectic jubilation. This is Haydn the hyperactive, Haydn the manic, light years away from the benign funster of popular myth.

In maximum contrast, Fey conducts the slow movements con amore, with a chamber-musical finesse. The alternating minor-major variations in No 70 (ludicrously described in the booklet as “a rondo in sonata form with variations in double counterpoint”) are beautifully paced and coloured, the filigree violin-writing delicately shaped, the repeats enhanced by fresh nuances and dynamic shadings. In the lovely Poco adagio variations of No 75 the repeats are more creatively embellished, with a mini-violin cadenza inserted at one point. This might get slightly irritating after the third or fourth hearing, though not, I suspect, as irritating as Fey's extreme tempo manipulations in the finales. I'm all for maximising the shock effect of Haydn's pauses. But why does he need to play slow and loose with the final page of No 75 when Haydn has already written the drastic lull in activity into the music? Fey is equally perverse in the astonishing D minor finale of No 70, teasing out the framing sections to absurd lengths. The upshot is that Haydn's edgy, faintly inscrutable humour becomes self-consciously laboured. All the more frustrating, then, that the movement's fugal centrepiece has a splenetic intensity I have never heard equalled. That rather sums it up.