Seventeen years ago, in a review article in Early Music (xix/2 (1991), pp. 247–58), I discussed three sets of the Beethoven symphonies performed with period instruments that appeared during the 1980s, recorded by the Hanover Band under Monica Huggett and Roy Goodman, The Academy of Ancient Music under Christopher Hogwood, and the London Classical Players under Roger Norrington. A fourth set was issued around the same time by Franz Brüggen and the Orchestra of the Eighteenth century and, during the 1990s, the Orchestre Révolutionaire et Romantique under John Eliot Gardiner contributed another set. Now Anima Eterna conducted by Jos van Immerseel seeks to add a new dimension to our appreciation of these iconic works. Each of the orchestras and conductors involved in producing the earlier sets added their own distinctive perspectives to the performance of Beethoven's symphonies. To the Hanover Band belongs the honour of being first in the field with a recording of all nine symphonies using period instruments, and it was in preparation for these performances that Jonathan Del Mar cut his teeth in making editions of the symphonies, which he later published so-called ‘Urtext’ editions with Bärenreiter. (The problematic nature of Urtexts as a basis for performance is beyond the scope of this review, but it is a serious issue for performers who aspire to be historically informed.) In terms of performance style, the Hanover Band recordings waver uneasily between the conventional ‘Baroque’ performance style that was characteristic of the 1970s and 80s and the standard ‘modern’ practice of that time. Christopher Hogwood's recordings were distinctive in attempting to re-create, as far as possible, the size of orchestra Beethoven had at his disposal for the first performances of his symphonies; thus the early symphonies were recorded with relatively modest orchestras, while the Seventh and Eighth, premiered in the festive atmosphere of the Congress of Vienna, were recorded with very large forces including doubled wind and string sections of around 60 players. In these recordings with large orchestras the kind of solo/tutti approach, characteristic of early 19th-century Viennese orchestral practice in such circumstances was employed, using single wind and reduced strings for quieter sections and the whole orchestra in more powerful ones. Curiously, neither of these sets made a consequential attempt to adhere to Beethoven's metronome marks of 1817/24. This was left to Roger Norrington, whose acceptance of the validity of the printed metronome marks went so far as to reproduce two in the Ninth Symphony (the Trio section of the Scherzo and the March in the Finale) that were clearly erroneous, with a misprinted note value of half the intended length (i.e. twice as slow as intended), as I demonstrated in my 1991 article. Gardiner's recordings, which followed in the early 1990s, differed little from Norrington's in respect of tempo or performing practices; in the Ninth Symphony, however, he approached the correct speed for the Marcia, but reverted to a conventional intermediate speed for the Trio of the Scherzo.