Grafting local vines on to European rootstock is how the great American orchestras were first established and how many continue to operate. Since its re-founding in 1926, the Pittsburgh Symphony has been just such an orchestra, well drilled in the best American way but with a sequence of old-school Europeans – Klemperer, Fritz Reiner, William Steinberg – among its guiding lights.

The orchestra’s music director since 2008 has been former Vienna Philharmonic viola player Manfred Honeck, a more than effective conductor of over 30 years’ experience. Another good graft? I was tempted to think so until the arrival of this alarming ‘tale of two cultures’ account of Beethoven’s Ninth.

Honeck begins the first movement abrasively in trumpets-and-drums mood, with sledgehammer sforzandos and a tempo that neglects Beethoven’s ma non troppo and un poco maestoso markings. It’s the same at the movement’s end, where more fusillades of brightly lit orchestral sound snuff out such traces of the music’s tragic mood as have managed to survive.

It’s strange, then, to find the lyric themes that arrive with the drop into B flat at bar 80 (1'59") so sensitively handled, as if Dr Jekyll has briefly managed to sideline his inner Hyde. The string-playing is especially fine, as we might expect with a former Vienna Philharmonic player as music director and the ‘no vibrato’ heresy kept firmly at bay. We hear this in the slow movement (played fairly swiftly as a kind of intermezzo), in the ‘speaking’ eloquence of the cello and bass recitatives at the start of the finale and in the strings’ hushed enunciation of the joy theme.

Not that Mr Hyde has left town. The Scherzo (all the repeats) is as relentless as it’s fast. As is the Trio, where even this distinguished first horn finds it difficult to articulate the music in a way that might give us tone-painting as opposed to mere locomotion.

In the finale, the quicker choral sections and tenor solo go helter-skelter in a way no opera conductor would countenance, while the great central meditation is mercilessly pulled about. Honeck relates in a booklet essay how he asks for a ‘speaking tone’ from the choir rather than ‘mere singing’, citing how in spoken German a word such as ‘umschlungen’ would be articulated as a diminuendo. Why, then, does the German-speaking Beethoven set ‘umschlungen’ as three full minims without diminuendo? As Karajan observed in a 1962 rehearsal disc, meddling with Beethoven’s note-values in these passages is nothing less than ‘the falsification of a document’.

You will find no such tampering in William Steinberg’s 1966 Pittsburgh Ninth, now part of a recent budget-price reissue of his complete 1963-66 Command Classics Beethoven cycle (DG, A/20). There are many fine things in the Steinberg set, not least an old-school account of the Ninth that is measured, beautifully thought through, and – dare one say it? – profound. Three things this newest Pittsburgh Ninth, sadly, is not.