In an interview for the long defunct ABC Radio National program The Score (for which I was Producer at the time), Frans Brüggen said of Mozart symphonies: “There is no such thing as ‘interpretation’.” While this might at first sound a trifle odd, I think after all this time I can see what he meant. 
He wanted the composer to speak
 for himself. Brüggen established
 the Orchestra of the Eighteenth
 Century in a very specific
 manner. He recruited Europe’s
 leading specialists in historically 
informed performance practice 
to make his band. It is in fact a
 combination of expert practitioners
 who are also are researchers and avid collaborators. He wanted it to be (and it still is) a sort of permanent workshop, where 
the members are always working together and listening to each other in the search 
for authentic sonorities. The goal in all this pursuit of sound colours is to allow the music to reveal itself.

Previous cycles of Beethoven symphonies have had as their star not the composer, but the conductor. Herbert von Karajan’s cycles especially come to mind of course (as good
 as they are, they are completely different in intent and certainly in effect). The Dutch critic...