‘June 1804’ says the legend at the film’s opening. Denis Matthews (in his Master Musicians volume, Dent: 1985) thought it was six months later that the Eroica was given a first run-through in the palace of Prince Lobkowitz, but had that been so we should have been denied Beethoven and his pupil Ferdinand Ries tramping river banks, and Beethoven and the object of his unrequited love lazing idly in the palace courtyard, so June it is. I’m not complaining: historical verisimilitude is always going to be at a premium in such reconstructions, and the makers of this BBC film do not take us for fools. They use what we know of the people and places concerned to invent a plausible narrative of politics, love and anger that, most importantly, centres on the music.

In fact the domestic scale of the setting is a powerful reminder of the work’s vast reach and capacity to shock. Potential purchasers will have to judge for themselves whether they are likely to be bothered by the soundtrack being palpably separate from the visuals, or the orchestra being visibly smaller than the sum of its excellent parts. The recording is instrumental in bringing film and symphony to life: winds to the fore, bassoons and growly double-basses balefully ever-present.

It’s a long time since I heard a modern performance of the Eroica shorn of its first-movement exposition repeat, but the old ways can still be made to work. Gardiner’s first movement has a bare and remorseless intensity that Jordi Savall’s rabble-rousing Naïve recording (7/97) aims at but never quite hits; his own previous DG recording (11/94) is nearer Beethoven’s metronome mark and some distance further from the expressive force of this new recording. The Scherzo is a little plainly phrased but Gardiner springs his surprise with the finale. A tempo that seems at first tepid grows around the music, allowing the fugue its due weight, the flute solo its pathos and the horns their full measure of glory.

The film’s producers think the performance worth hearing on a separate set of tracks, without noises off, and I agree with them: there are only so many times that you will want to hear Beethoven tell Ries to ‘piss off’ after his pupil has interrupted halfway through the first movement. In a further act of charity, Opus Arte spares us the otherwise ubiquitous musical excerpt over the title menus. The enterprise is probably a one-off but it’s tempting to imagine what this team could do with the Fifth, or even the Ninth.