A Beethoven ‘cycle’ played piecemeal over the course of 14 years, by a band of young musicians changing personnel throughout that time, recorded as one-off live performances in a large plastic barn. It doesn’t look much on paper, let alone a project deserving the imprimatur of the DG cartouche.

So cursory a dismissal would entirely reckon without the animating spirit at work here, Gábor Takács-Nagy. This contributor is as guilty as any other of willing submission to the cult(ure) of maestro worship, but see for yourself on Medici TV or YouTube just how literally animated Takács-Nagy is, how little he has in common with old time maestros and yet how much of a collaborative spirit of endeavour he inspires in his musicians. Or simply put on the First Symphony to hear how intently those young musicians listen to each other and reach more nearly than many established ensembles a goal of ‘chamber-music’ Beethoven that would seem natural for the one-time founder-leader of the Takács Quartet.

In an extensive booklet interview with Jan Swafford, Takács-Nagy explains how he had never conducted some of the symphonies before preparing these performances. Perhaps it takes a musician who has had Beethoven flowing through his veins for decades, and yet is coming to these pieces afresh, to (for instance) park a doctrinaire adherence to metronome marks and repeats for the first movement of the Eroica, reach the development section (3'00"ff), and take stock of the struggle to come.

At almost 16 minutes, the ‘Marcia funebre’ takes its expressive cue not from the drumbeat ostinato but the oboe lament above; one of several movements in which the conductor’s investment in the personality of each phrase is all too audible. But like the Takács Quartet in the Adagio mesto of Op 59 No 1, he takes the long view; if you drew the architectural blueprint for this performance it would be in long Palladian arcades rather than trenches and barricades, with a nobility that makes the collapse of sense (9'45") all the more palpable.

So it continues, through an intensely searching slow introduction to the Fourth (again, no exposition repeat), a tightly knit Fifth bearing perhaps unsurprising resemblance to the ‘Hungarian Beethoven’ of Iván Fischer and his Budapest crew, to a relaxed but alert Sixth in which the microphones are placed closer than elsewhere (recorded, like the Second, in a Bavarian Schloss) and Takács-Nagy is more inclined to crack the whip on vibrato. The sleepy Larghetto of the Second is a rare misjudgement of tempo – rare for him, rather than in the context of the symphony’s performing tradition – only partially rescued by effortful portamento.

The self-consciously spread chords to open the Seventh are another ‘idea’ in search of more refinement and rehearsal than they receive here. This is not the place to come for the laser-guided detail, the tightly balled tension or overwhelming catharsis of Currentzis (Sony, 4/21) and Petrenko (BPO, 1/21) in the symphony. Guided by Takács-Nagy’s lofty phrasing and the gathering momentum of the account as a whole, we might more fruitfully listen to it in the context of those 1811 projects of Enlightenment values which Beethoven produced for the new theatre in Budapest around the time of the Seventh, King Stephen and The Ruins of Athens.

The Ninth came last, recorded in 2022, and by then the engineers had sorted out a rig that takes most of the problematic acoustics out of the equation for the orchestra, though the chorus sound hardly less backwards in the mix than they do for listeners in the Salle des Combins on a close July evening. The soloists enjoy a more favourable placement, and it’s rare to hear the alto part articulated as an equal to the other three. As with the previous eight finales, applause is retained, and not tracked separately.

In the thicker textures of the Ninth, and the outer movements in particular, there is more noticeable tinkering with the dynamics and the voicing to get the beast off the ground and up in the air, but it will be a relief for many listeners to hear a modern account of the symphony that does not drive the first movement into a concrete wall and watch as the wreckage flies far and wide. Overall: it’s probably no one’s idea of a perfect Beethoven cycle, least of all Takács-Nagy’s. But for the insights of a lifetime’s accumulated wisdom in this music, it’s required listening.