“This is the end!…From outside, floating over the danger zone, it must be magnificent drama, like Hiroshima, Nagasaki, 9/11…No greater monument of humanity to failed dreams, failed ideals, failed hope than this…” Beethoven in heroic mode – and this, you may or may not have guessed, is the massively affirmative finale of the Fifth – has provoked reams of pretentious guff over the years. But for its mix of naivety, lurid hyperbole and sheer wrong-headedness, Franz Winter’s note sets new standards. This apocalyptic language seems even more absurd when the performance of the Fifth, both as execution and interpretation, is so ordinary. In the initial motto Kuhn falls into the familiar “triplet trap”, after which the fanatically compressed opening movement chugs along at way below Beethoven’s prescribed metronome marking. The Andante, shorn of its enlivening con moto, is heavy and sluggish, with some unalluring dolce playing from the strings (not helped, admittedly, by a close, airless recording), while you would go far to hear a more sober, unterrifying performance of the third movement.

In the First Symphony, hardly less challenging interpretatively, Kuhn coaxes some crisp playing from his hard-working modern-instrument band. His division of the violins left and right pays particular dividends in the first two movements. Again, though, the performance is cautiously paced, short on wit and élan. The Andante needs a lighter touch and more guileful phrasing to work at Kuhn’s stately tempo, while the Minuet-Scherzo crucially loses tension at the wonderfully conspiratorial rising chromatic sequence from bar 33 (0'24"). Enough said. Winter’s notes gave me a certain perverse pleasure. But with the market already saturated by memorable performances, at every price level, this is a Beethoven disc too far.