‘The Norrington Nine’ sounds vaguely seditious, which is how I imagine Sir Roger would wish it to sound. Seventy next year and the possessor of as enquiring a mind as you are likely to meet in a day’s journey, he retains the intelligent child’s talent for jumping out on you with a loud cry of ‘Da DA!’ after the execution of some infuriatingly clever trick. (Beethoven, you might recall, spends most of the Second Symphony doing something similar.)

When Norrington’s earlier set of the Nine with the London Classical Players (now on Virgin Classics) reached completion in November 1989, I wrote: ‘The set articulates the period-instrument case in Beethoven as compellingly as it is possible to imagine at present though, Norrington being Norrington, in ten years he will probably be echoing lines from The Jew of Malta: ‘But that was another country/And besides, the wench is dead…’

And so it proves. One of an élite cadre of English conductors parachuted behind enemy orchestral lines in the mid-1990s, Norrington has helped mastermind the neo-authentic ‘modern orchestras/old methods’ approach to Beethoven performance. Some collectors may not be best pleased to discover that period sound is now an optional extra, that articulation is all, but that was always on the cards. Modifying first principles in order to annexe the lucrative heartlands of the old order is, commercially and politically, a leitmotif of our times.

As reaction to the Rattle cycle recently proved, modern fiddles played with little or no vibrato can be an instant irritant. Norrington’s Stuttgart strings are even more vibrato-lite. He also drafts in valveless trumpets – variously and subtly used by Beethoven and given particular prominence by Norrington – narrow-scale Baroque trombones and small pedal-free timpani played with wooden sticks. This is Beethoven the irrepressible venturer, lean, mean and stripped for action.

It is clear as early as the cycle’s 11th bar that Norrington has studied the new Bärenreiter Edition; that said, he shows no sign of being bound by it. Though he now modifies the steepness of the swells he adds to the fermatas as the start of the Fifth Symphony, he has not relinquished the Beechamesque habit of adding hairpin dynamics where none are written. The long appoggiatura after the double bar in the first movement of the Fourth Symphony is again in evidence, an exquisite embellishment which Furtwängler and Karajan also approved. I cannot see the point of the slowed trills at the end of the Second Symphony’s introduction but the leisurely release of the solo piccolo trill at bar 338 (9'15") of the finale of the Fifth Symphony is an inspired piece of interpretative licence, like a flag being unfurled on some distant battlement.

Mention is made in the booklet of the ‘illustrative’ style of Norrington’s conducting, ‘the music’s structure made transparent by cues aimed at helping the audience’. Conducting is gesture but on record gesture needs to register aurally if it is to register at all. That piccolo entry might be one such example. Another would be Norrington’s clear flagging of his intention to follow the more hazardous of the two routes through the finale of the Eighth Symphony. In this ‘tail wagging the crocodile’ version of events, thrillingly realised here, the coda announces its arrival halfway through the movement at bars 267-82 (3'17"-3'33").

Rattle, who shares many of Norrington’s preoccupations, conducts a strikingly different Eighth. He treats the finale as an epic sonata structure (coda at 438) at the kind of tempi Furtwängler favoured, spacious but robust. In the finale, the approaches are complementary but I prefer Rattle in the first movement. (Despite repeated playings, I can’t ‘hear’ where the recapitulation is in Norrington’s high-speed account.) Rattle also has the Vienna Philharmonic strings at his disposal. In the third movement trio, they voice melodic counterpoints and attendant harmonies in a way the Stuttgart players don’t appear to attempt.

‘Beethoven wrote 10 operas,’ Norrington once remarked, ‘nine of which happen to be symphonies’. These newer, more ‘modern’ performances bring that view into sharper relief than was the case with Norrington’s earlier set. Played in a more free-spirited way than previously and at a faster tempo even than that suggested by the printed metronome, the Eighth Symphony’s Allegretto scherzando is now as cheekily incident-ridden as, say, the Act 2 Trio of Le nozze di Figaro. The downside is a certain impatience with moments of stasis or repose. Where there is a drama toward, as in the Funeral March of the Eroica or the Andante con moto of the Fifth, Norrington can get away with it but collectors may well feel a want of sentiment in the lyric preambles to some of the slow movements.

Comparing new with old, I do miss the mingled wit and humanity of Norrington’s period instrument Fourth and the bustle and reflective beauty of his earlier Pastoral. (The new Pastoral is cooler, more bracing.) The new Seventh, by contrast, is self-evidently superior. The orchestral sound is brighter, less encumbered, the recording sharper and clearer. Fiery and festive, it thrives on Norrington’s exuberant yet focused approach, much as the First and Second symphonies do (a strangely underspeed account of the Second Symphony’s Scherzo the only disappointment).

It would be silly to deny that Toscanini did all this as well, or better, in celebrated recorded accounts of the First, Second and Seventh symphonies. Yet there are times when Norrington does take us into new territory. The finale of the Fifth receives a remarkable reading in as much as it manages to marry a sense of the éclat terrible of a war-torn age with that same age’s lofty, aspirational mood. High drama and unforced nobility is what one used to look for from Furtwängler, Klemperer et al. (Mackerras has something of that quality still: a superb reading, lithe, exciting and relatively uncomplicated.) In his earlier performance, Norrington seemed hamstrung by the period band. Gardiner’s period performance freed up the sonorities but the reading itself is rather relentless. The newer Norrington is more various, more incident filled, though with none of the somewhat brutal huffing and puffing we have in Harnoncourt’s rhythmically disjunct account.

Norrington continues to take a questing, enquiring view of the Ninth Symphony. Happily, he has abandoned his absurdly slow reading of the finale’s Allegro assai vivace, making do instead with prominent cymbals and a boldly fanfaring first trumpet. He also gives us a less legato, more martial account of the instrumental exposition of the finale’s joy theme, the sense of speech on the verge of song excitingly caught.

Beethoven’s metronome marks have long been a godsend to theatrically-minded interpreters. The fact that Norrington now occasionally successfully trumps them, adopting speeds even faster than those suggested by Beethoven when he appended the marks in 1817, confirms the fact that no cycle of the Nine can truly hope to convince unless the interpreter can marry the letter of the printed text with a life-enhancing pulse and life-defining diction that is distinctively his own. To conduct Beethoven, you probably need a preternatural degree of self-belief; to know him, you also need to know yourself. Which may explain why interpretative decisions which had me tearing my hair out a month or two ago (the ludicrously quick start to the Eroica’s Funeral March, for example) have since come to seem entirely right within the context of the performance itself and the cycle as a whole.