Like a postcard from a forgotten world, the Australian Chamber Orchestra’s Beethoven album lands in our postbags. This album was recorded live in 2020, an early hurrah to celebrate old Ludwig’s 250th anniversary turning into the last hurrah of a globe on the brink of a pandemic. And it finds us, four years later, still in need of the composer’s symphonies as a means of understanding and interpreting life.

In answer to the question of whether there’s room for yet another recording of Beethoven’s symphonies, when versions multiply, if not quite exponentially like viruses, at the very least prolifically, music director Richard Tognetti emphatically says yes. Not least because this is, so the ACO believes, the first Australian recording made on original instruments (or copies of them) and gut strings (though there’s no detail given). That’s a milestone for sure but given how many other period-instrument recordings from other countries exist, it perhaps only matters if the results are any good.

It’s hard not to be won over by the performances’ zeal, with swift tempos and bursts of energy frothed up in the strings. In spirit, it’s not as...