I read one description of this performance as “lean, mean and joyless”. My version would be trim, taut but certainly not terrific; or, refreshingly scrubbed, grimly business-like and fatuously dynamic. For me, it seems to cleave to the 21st-century default setting of Beethoven’s Ninth where the architecture, fury, depth and ultimate glory are all deliberately (or so it seems) underplayed. Then again, Charles Mackerras recorded it in the last century and...