As budget-price sets of the Nine go, this Mackerras cycle has never really had a clear run at the competition. Launched with a recording of the Ninth which Stephen Johnson reviewed with a fair amount of enthusiasm in 1991, it was completed in 1997 with a coupling of the Second and Eighth symphonies which I liked even more. In between times, the cycle was only spasmodically noticed, a glowing endorsement in the Penguin Guide notwithstanding. Strategically, it was unfortunate that the cycle’s launch coincided with the appearance of Harnoncourt’s Gramophone Award-winning set and that its completion post-dated the appearance of the widely-praised Zinman set on Arte Nova, both of which were similarly conceived.

Stephen Johnson summed up Mackerras’s approach as ‘a blend of period consciousness and traditional classicism’. A Mackerras performance will always be a persistently enlivening affair rhythmically, something that is not always the case with Harnoncourt. What’s more, like Harnoncourt but unlike Zinman, Mackerras is an honest broker where new scholarship is concerned. Zinman and Arte Nova made a great hue and cry about being first in the field with Jonathan Del Mar’s new Bärenreiter edition of the symphonies. In fact, Mackerras had been using Del Mar’s work from the outset in 1991. He was also using it properly, unlike Zinman who was primarily interested in cherry-picking the edition’s more interesting findings while reserving the right to indulge his own ‘fancy’ when the mood was upon him.

No set of the Nine is ever going to give us the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. When Stephen Johnson commended Mackerras’s fierily splendid coupling of the Fifth and Seventh symphonies (12/93), he added the rider: ‘If, like R[ichard] O[sborne], you regard Furtwängler as the summum bonum, then Mackerras will probably seem too literal’. As it happens, I don’t find Mackerras unduly literal in either. His Fifth is very fine, as is his account of the Seventh, even if it is possible through the deployment of broader tempi to make more of the epic harmonic debate going on within the symphony.

The only time I found the playing unacceptably ‘literal’ was in the first movement of the Eroica. Taken at tempi largely determined by Beethoven’s challengingly quick metronome mark, the movement ends up sounding a bit like Mendelssohn with a headache. Here, and in the first movement of the Ninth, where the music transcends the time and circumstances of its making, I would, indeed, turn in preference to a Furtwängler or a Klemperer. However, comparisons of that order of magnitude are not the point here. What is remarkable about Mackerras’s set is its unflagging vitality, the sense it conveys from first note to last of the music’s primal energy.

The Liverpool playing is rarely less than accomplished. To hear the players at their best, try the Pastoral Symphony, bright and fresh as an early spring morning, with a thrillingly quick Scherzo, more furiant than Ländler. The choral singing is another matter. To achieve his aim of ‘lightening’ the finale, making it more an ode to joy, less an ‘uphill effort of aspiration’ (GB Shaw’s phrase), Mackerras should have used a small professional choir. The soloists, however, are all first rate. The recordings wear well though it is arguable that New Broadcasting House, Manchester (Symphonies Nos 1, 3, 4 and 6) is kinder to the Liverpool strings than the acoustic of Philharmonic Hall where they can occasionally seem undernourished.

Since there is no accounting for taste, I am not prepared to say that this is ‘the’ bargain buy where the Nine are concerned. What I can say is that if a copy of the set was sent to every school in the country, there would be fewer children chanting that mind-numbing contemporary mantra ‘Beethoven’s boring, Miss’.