If you attempt that with a modern symphony orchestra, there will always be a certain comfort factor, a plushness, which, I feel, doesn’t help the listener to savor all that is most original in the score. It can sound a tad too comfortable. If you push the needle up to “fff,” you’ll get excitement of course, but there’s a danger of it becoming too bombastic and hectoring. But if you ask them to pull back to compensate, it can sound half-baked. The great advantage of the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique is that you can push them absolutely to the nth degree, so the instruments almost get to breaking point, but there will always be clarity as well as exhilaration.

Another thing I think is important is to encourage the players to “speak” their lines, so that each phrase emerges as a kind of sentence made up of words that they articulate with consonants as well as vowels. Beethoven, it seems to me, is asking for declaimed narration. He conceives of his symphonies as developing and dramatic narratives, and that, in turn, demands an acutely conscious declamatory approach from the players.

Nowadays historically informed orchestras are no longer regarded as an experimental oddity coming out of left field. There are still some naysayers and skeptics, and still a few famous conductors, pianists, violinists of my generation who think it is all a load of rubbish. They don’t give credence to the historical or interpretive validity of what we’ve been trying to do. It doesn’t particularly bother me, and overall there is much more interest and acceptance that this is a genuine and valid way of interpreting Beethoven than there was 30 years ago.

I don’t think Beethoven needs an anniversary to be played a lot. I’m sure he doesn’t. But if we are going to go with this 250th anniversary, we must be very, very sure that we have something — and that he has something — to say to us now in 2020 that is pertinent to the way we look at life, society and culture. I definitely feel this to be the case. There are clear parallels between his situation in the early 1800s and ours today, between the political agitation and rebelliousness that he felt, the discomfort that he expressed in his symphonies, and the situation in which we now find ourselves.

The danger is that these pieces become over-familiar and lose their impact if they continue to be played only in an all-purpose, generic early-to-mid-20th-century style that’s no different than Wagner or Strauss. Maybe it’s a paradox that through the attempt to reconstruct Beethoven’s own ideal, imaginary orchestra, it brings his music closer into our present world. But I firmly believe that that is the case. A listener attending our performances will, I hope, hear greater clarity, greater transparency, greater rhetoric, a greater sense of excitement, freshness and ebullience. All of those things.

Ideally, listeners will be here for the whole cycle. Performing the nine symphonies in chronological order provides a unique access to an incredibly adventurous mind, and to an organic sense of development. If you just dip in for one or two concerts, that’s fine, but you’ll be losing out on that sense of growth and development. I think ideally it’s the entire cycle. It’s the journey we are on which we want to share with you.