Forget what you know regarding Beethoven’s life, for as director Agnieszka Holland writes in the CD booklet, this film is one of fiction, a story of beauty and the beast represented by the fictitious copyist Anna Stoltz and Beethoven himself. In crude terms her character can be found in the Andante from the third Razumovsky Quartet and an Etude written for her by Antoni Lazarkiewicz, the film’s other composer, with the Grosse Fuge portraying Beethoven. Lazarkiewicz has also arranged as a surreal fantasy a portion of the finale of the Choral Symphony that sounds like a piece of synthetic Berio.

The film received a pasting from UK critics but as the soundtrack chooses from a vast archive of great performances, it’s possible to retrieve something from the experience. The opening track, the Grosse Fuge, is a bold choice given the wider audience for whom this soundtrack is aiming. It receives a magnificent performance from the Takács Quartet which is as finely attuned to the music’s jagged outcrops as its sheltered byways. The uninterrupted flow of the sweet and soulful second movement of the third Razumovsky is pure poetry in their hands. Ashkenazy gives a brilliant but never rushed performance of the finale to the early Sonata in C minor and his straightforward manner in the Arietta from Beethoven’s last sonata is illuminated by the very clear Decca recording. The brief variation from the Diabelli set comes from Stephen Kovacevich’s 1968 recording which in this company does show its near-on 40-year provenance.

Haitink’s performance of the finale of the Ninth Symphony with the Royal Concertgebouw and a quartet of soloists led by Lucia Popp does not storm the heavens and I don’t ever recall being so aware of this movement’s proceeding by paragraphs. However, it would seem to have found a comfortable place in a well planned and wide-ranging celebration of Beethoven’s genius.