This set of the nine symphonies derives from two cycles given in the Berlin Philharmonie in October 2015. Subscribers to the Berlin Philharmonic’s Digital Concert Hall will probably be familiar with the video transmissions, included here on two Blu-ray discs. What we also have is a Blu-ray audio disc and five conventional CDs. Housed in one of the Berlin Philharmonic’s elegant but impossible to file oblong boxes, it’s an expensive set, though not markedly more so than the five CDs or four DVDs of the Berliners’ memorable live 2001 Rome cycle under Abbado or the six CDs of Mariss Jansons’s beautifully crafted 2012 Bavarian RSO set, which adds six musical ‘Reflections’ on Beethoven by living composers.

This is Simon Rattle’s second commercially recorded traversal of the nine. The first was a live 2002 EMI set with the Vienna Philharmonic. This received some dusty reviews, largely due to the effect of the Vienna Philharmonic being invited to play in what period-instrument people choose to call a ‘historically informed’ – ie vibrato-light – style. There are long sequences in the 2002 set where the Vienna players inveigle Rattle into their own richly freighted and no less ‘historically informed’ style; and then memorable things happen. Too often, though, conductor and orchestra are not singing from the same hymn-sheet.

All that need be said about the new set is that, after 13 years together, Rattle and the Berliners are largely at one. Rattle may want fewer players on the platform than Furtwängler or Karajan – he uses roughly 50 musicians, the same number as Harnoncourt in his widely admired Chamber Orchestra of Europe set – but this remains the Berlin Philharmonic: its distinctive style revealingly intact.

The first two symphonies are an untrammeled delight (Rattle always was a good Haydn conductor), as is a performance of the Fourth Symphony which, despite an absurdly over-prominent second-violin line at the start of the Adagio, closely resembles the 2001 Abbado and 1962 Karajan. The Pastoral, by contrast, has a warm Bruno Walter ish feel to it, making it a rather more congenial affair (an over-emotional nightingale notwithstanding) than the Abbado or the earlier Rattle.

But what of those old bugbears, the odd-numbered symphonies? Here Rattle has tautened his readings of the first and third movements of the Ninth to generally good effect. The Fifth Symphony, like the Eighth, now has a less enforced feel to it, though Rattle still likes to play the finale in the same tempo as the Scherzo. In Vienna he struck a tempo midway between Beethoven’s two excellent metronomes; here he ups the ante by taking the tempo for the finale at 90 plus (the metronome is 84), turning a plain allegro into an allegro con brio. In the Eroica’s Funeral March he continues to make a curious acceleration midway through the Maggiore. Most conductors make accelerations as the music moves towards the central climaxes; but the staging posts come at turning points in the ascent, not halfway up the first incline.

If there is a general point to be made about rhythm, it’s that the performances occasionally belie Rattle’s assertion that the orchestra still commands that ‘long flexible fluid line with an immense pulse underneath’ which was a hallmark of the Karajan era. I’m sure it does. It’s there in much of the Seventh Symphony, in a superlative account of the finale in particular. But the sense of sustained intensity which is one of the features of Abbado’s Rome cycle isn’t always there. Is this due in part to the lack of a continuous beat, something Abbado and Jansons (the videos reveal) generally deploy but which Rattle often seems happy to forego, even in a work as metrically complex as the Eroica?

The conductor-cam option is one of the fascinations of the Abbado DVDs. It’s also the option I prefer, inasmuch as it limits the input of video directors, whose grasp of the music is often tenuous. Four of the Rattle telecasts are directed by a skilled musician, Tilo Krause, but even here things occasionally fall apart: witness the chaotic filming of bars 284 97 of the first movement of the Eroica as the mysterious E minor subject steals out from under the shadow of the development’s catastrophic climax.

The sound on the new set is for the most part clear and full-bodied, though a blurred acoustic at the start of the Eroica turns the two summoning crotchet chords into joined-at-the-hip dotted minims. Abbado’s Rome set has the keener acoustic and, on balance, a more intent quality to the music-making. That said, this latest Berlin cycle is a decidedly distinguished affair.