Previous instalments in Harmonia Mundi’s multi-ensemble anniversary Beethoven cycle from these players (4/20, 10/20) have raised issues of balance between strings and winds, and the same is perplexingly the case here. The Fourth’s Allegro fizzes with corybantic fury but once the texture thickens up the 21-strong strings are obscured beneath the gloriously unruly wind and brass. For all the advantages of coordination between the front and back desks of Bernhard Forck’s compact string group in Berlin’s Teldex Studio, the pure heft simply isn’t there to guarantee that all the voices in the discourse are heard with equal weight. That’s a shame, for when these performances catch fire, they can thrill as Beethoven surely always should.

Other, more exposed moments might perhaps have benefited from the direction of a conductor. The Fourth’s slow introduction (rather swifter than Beethoven’s crotchet=66) is short on mystery, while the slow movement of the same symphony could be played with a drop more affection. The Eighth’s Allegretto is dispatched with ample concern for accuracy but misses the humour within and between the notes.

The couplings represent composers Beethoven admired or who admired him. Cherubini’s Lodoïska Overture is more naturalistically balanced by Riccardo Muti, whose La Scala pit band imbue it with a greater degree of theatrical expectancy, appropriately enough in a recording of the complete opera. The post-Haydn Sturm und Drang of Méhul’s First Symphony, too, flows more persuasively (and swiftly) in the hands of Christoph König and his Luxembourg orchestra as a coupling for the Eroica Symphony. Moments of excitement and intriguing programming, then, but no real challenge either to favourite recordings of the Beethoven or those listed of the Cherubini and Méhul.