This short album of Beethoven’s theatre music is a strange one. The overtures to Kotzebue’s 1811 plays Die Ruinen von Athen and König Stephan get occasional outings, but the other theatrical bits and pieces from them – with the notable exception of the persistent ‘Marcia alla turca’ – are usually found only on complete Beethoven projects. Music from Leonore Prohaska, three scraps of music for a play of 1815 by Friedrich Duncker about a woman who fought in the Prussian army against Napoleon, is even rarer, though does include an orchestral arrangement of the Funeral March from the Op 26 Piano Sonata. Yet this is not an album for the completists. For one thing, not quite all the music is there, numbers from the different works are reordered and intermingled, and the melodramas from König Stephan and Leonore Prohaska appear without their spoken-word content. This being for stream-only, there are also no explanatory notes or texts.

There is a reason, though. This was the material chosen for an innovative concert given last May at La Seine Musicale in Paris in which the music was performed at the centre of a wrap-around projection of animated imagery inspired by Japanese manga comics. There was also a new story to link them all; entitled Beethoven Wars, it depicted warring factions on a distant planet becoming reconciled and deciding to move to Earth, where they build a theatre to symbolise hope and resilience. It is thus possible to see why the music’s original context lies low; a soundtrack of borrowed Beethoven for a newly devised story needs to be free of direct associations with Fidelio, Schiller and Solemn Mass. Yes, it’s Beethoven coasting, but it in places it recognisably breathes the same air as those greater works, and even at its lower level bears something of the ‘utopianism, heroism and humanism’ that Laurence Equilbey detects in the philosophy of manga.

Whether that works better than the original settings I could only tell you if I myself had seen Beethoven Wars. The tiny clips I have seen online look exciting, but meanwhile, as an audio-only experience, this release is an unsatisfying one, the music simply too bitty to join up. I’m not aware of other recordings on period instruments, however, and Equilbey’s forces certainly have the taut energy and focused sound we are used to in Beethoven these days. The soloists are a little fragile, but attractively so, and the glass harmonica in Leonore Prohaska is a weird delight. I can’t help feeling, though, that the main function of this release is as a souvenir of the live production.