Born to Conduct, the title of the hour-long documentary about Philippe Jordan which is included in the new set, is not as self-serving as it might seem – not, that is, to anyone familiar with the work of his late father, the formidable and too little known Franco-German master Armin Jordan. His recordings of Haydn’s The Creation, Mozart’s The Magic Flute and Wagner’s Parsifal merit a place in any well-sourced collection, as do many of his recordings from the French repertory. (See Erato’s 13-CD retrospective ‘Armin Jordan: The French Symphonic Recordings’, which Peter Quantrill reviewed last month.) Meanwhile, if this first set of the Beethoven symphonies from the 42-year-old Philippe Jordan is anything to judge by, he too is a musician of special character and discipline.

It is a forward-thinking director of the Paris Opéra who invites his orchestra to perform the nine Beethoven symphonies. Like the Covent Garden and New York Metropolitan orchestras (‘Levine’s Ferrari’ as Jordan calls the latter), the orchestra of the Paris Opéra has never doubled as a concert-giving organisation. France’s (and the world’s) first great Beethoven conductor, François-Antoine Habeneck, might have established such an ensemble in the late 1820s; yet, despite being director of the much-lauded Opéra orchestra, he lacked the necessary political and financial power. As a working alternative, he established the Orchestre de la Société des Concerts du Conservatoire, with which he spent many years rehearsing and preparing these formidably difficult works for public performance.

In his preface to the set, Jordan talks of small halls (the tiny Lobkowitz Palace where the Eroica was first performed), slimmed-down orchestras and fast metronomes. In the event, none of this pertains. The vast modernist Opéra Bastille and the smaller and more generously upholstered Palais Garnier both boast large auditoria. As a consequence, the orchestra is substantial (roughly the size of Habenek’s, though without Habeneck’s antiphonally divided violins), with speeds that are keen without being unduly rushed.

As a conductor, Jordan knows his trade. Those who remember Hans Schmidt-Isserstedt’s widely collected 1960s Decca cycle with the Vienna Philharmonic will find similar satisfaction here, even if, understandably, there are times when the Paris musicians take fire and times when their approach to the notes is rather more circumspect. The only performance I didn’t care for was the that of the Ninth; it has a tentative first movement and a finale where the large and slightly unruly Paris Opéra Chorus brings to the music something of the feel of a works outing.

Jordan’s reading of the Eroica may be work in progress (there are some old-fashioned slowings and subito piano ‘effects’ which could usefully be discarded) but the road map is a good one. In the Seventh and Eighth symphonies he refuses to be rushed yet retains a keen sense of where tension needs to be built. He segues the opening two movements of the Seventh Symphony and the second and third movements of the Eighth to rather good effect.

There are spruce and stylish accounts of the two early symphonies but it is the performances of the Fourth and Fifth symphonies that genuinely stand out. The Fifth has always been a French speciality. Carl Schuricht’s 1949 Paris Conservatoire recording (Decca, 9/50) was famous in its day. Indeed, the encomium it received in these columns (‘intense, vital and dramatic’) could be used here more or less word for word. Like Schuricht, Jordan keeps the Scherzo and the finale in the same basic pulse. One difference is that Jordan takes all the repeats, including the rarely played Scherzo repeat. In the Fourth Symphony, German heft is married to Grecian fire rather as it is in Karajan’s first Berlin account (DG, 2/63), complete with the same lovingly unfurled string and wind appoggiaturas in the first-movement development.

The video direction is sensible. Look up from the score and the camera will generally be following what you are following. Sadly the sound quality is none too good from either venue. A certain boxiness prevails, added to which there are some acoustic black spots which have either gone unnoticed or been impossible to remedy. Most troubling are the pianissimo horn pedals which go off like foghorns, drowning out the real matter in hand. The start of the Ninth Symphony suffers particular badly, as does the ‘Scene by the Brook’ in what is an otherwise splendidly earthy account of the Pastoral Symphony. We are used to hearing nightingales, cuckoos and quails in the Heiligenstadt woods near where Beethoven walked but not the bittern’s unearthly boom.