Thomas Dausgaard’s Beethoven Eighth crackles with life and makes an enthusiastic play for the score’s zanier elements, such as the syncopated accents near the beginning of the first movement’s development section (Rattle in Vienna makes the same important point). At around six seconds into the Allegretto scherzando my internal metronome detected a subtle dip in tempo, nothing troublesome, but it did register every time I played it. Warmly drawn horns sit happily at the centre of the Menuetto and the finale has a finely tensed feel to it, keenly played with cut-glass tremolandos. Gardiner is marginally weightier (and more reverberantly recorded) and Norrington still impresses with his raw spontaneity, but Dausgaard’s trim, high-energy performance appealed.

The rest of the programme subscribes to the same boisterous interpretative style. I’m always amazed at the abrupt opening of The Ruins of Athens overture, here sounding more starkly pre-Romantic than ever, though I would have liked a touch more grandeur in Namensfeier. The King Stephen Overture sounds suitably jovial and it’s good to hear the two brief marches from the same score (especially the slightly creepy “Geistlicher Marsch”). Even rarer are two snippets of music for Kuffner’s tragedy Tarpeja, a work named after the legendary lady who unintentionally revealed the path to Rome to her enemies. Old-school hi-fi addicts weaned on Dorati’s heavily armed Minneapolis Wellington’s Victory may be disappointed that Dausgaard and his team imitate guns and canons with percussion rather than import the real thing from the military. But the “Victory Symphony” comes off well (with a featherlight fugue near the final approach) and so does a well paced Fidelio Overture. All in all, a fine programme – one that maintains the series’ generally high standard thus far.