Mikhail Pletnev’s desire to remake Beethoven for the modern age is understandable. You don’t have to share his deep dislike of period performance – “Where are the fleas? Remember in those days they didn’t wash” – to recognise that when innovation turns to orthodoxy ossification can quickly follow. Much latter-day Beethoven playing is, indeed, overdriven, metronomic, utilitarian in spirit. Sadly, you can no more “remake” a Beethoven symphony than you can remake the Mona Lisa. Playing styles and performing contexts change but, if the mathematically complex notational structures that make the symphony remain fixed, the interpretative problems tend to remain the same (albeit susceptible of different solutions) whether your name is Habeneck or Wagner, Weingartner or Wand.

“No Beethoven recording in recent years holds so many surprises in store,” claims the author of the booklet essay. A first hearing does indeed bring surprises, not all of them pleasant as potentially enlivening performances are subverted by the conductor’s wilful manipulation of rhythm and structure. A second hearing, needless to say, brings no such surprises.

If you listen to the set chronologically you will be rewarded with marvellous accounts of the first two symphonies. I remember a time when so-called “great” conductors were troubled by these pieces. Toscanini had their measure but there were others (Furtwängler, for example) who were all at sea. If period performance has done nothing else for Beethoven, it has solved this particular conundrum. These performances show Pletnev’s Beethoven at its commanding, enlivening best. The playing of the Russian National Orchestra – a vibrant young ensemble blessed with a smattering of older, wiser heads – has relish and impulse, with secure bass-lines and transparent textures.

The first instance of Pletnev manipulating Beethoven’s written text comes in the Trio of the Second Symphony, which he turns into a comic opera jape. It’s rather fun. The real problems start with the exposition of the Eroica where he establishes no discernible pulse. The music is mercilessly pulled about, racing on and holding back in ways that are largely unrelated to the music’s underlying harmonic structure. Since this is expository material, the distortions become ever more marked as the material is revisited during the course of Beethoven’s astonishing 691-bar movement. I have distant memories of a fellow Russian, Serge Koussevitzky, doing something similar, though not to this degree.

In the Ninth Symphony, where Pletnev’s astonishingly slow start gives way to an increasingly febrile continuation, there is some kind of linear development. In the first movement of the Pastoral there is not even that consolation. It is difficult to imagine this being more bizarrely conducted. The first four bars are a coquettishly phrased Andante going on Adagio, after which the music kicks like a recalcitrant mule before careering off into the distance. The “Scene by the Brook”, by contrast, is settled and serene, blessed by wind and string playing of great distinction.

The rhythmic articulation at the start of the Fifth Symphony, a notorious black spot, would be well-nigh perfect were it not for the massive pauses Pletnev introduces between the fermatas. And what is to be gained from the three-second pause he inserts before the Eroica’s sudden dash for the wire in its presto peroration? The set is riddled with extraneous silences, only a handful of which are audible edits, as Pletnev parcels up the music into set-piece episodes.

Though Pletnev must have seen the new Bärenreiter edition, he retains some Romantic and post-Romantic effects. I see no real problem with this. In the coda of the first movement of the Eroica he extends the trumpet line but since he keeps it in check and knows where the real climax is, no damage is done (except by the hammily contrived ritardando that accompanies the climax).

The best performances among the later symphonies are those of the Fourth and the Seventh symphonies. The Eighth, by contrast, is stodgily conducted. The Ninth, once under way, is a fairly swift affair, in the instrumental movements at least. The finale is well done, a performance of discipline and relish, carefully assembled.

The recordings, made over a period of 11 days in studio conditions in the Great Hall of the Moscow State Conservatory, are excellent. Put on the start of the finale of the Seventh, where it is notoriously difficult to balance the strings against the winds, and the result is first-rate. Which is why the set frustrates. For every movement conducted by Dr Jekyll there is another just around the corner awaiting its fate at the hands of Mr Hyde.