Writing in 1802, Beethoven admitted to being "infected by revolutionary fervour". Events in France during the previous 13 years had had an impact that was to reverberate around Europe musically as well as politically. Yet Beethoven's admiration for Gallic composers (he regarded the Parisian Cherubini, for example, as his greatest contemporary) is not particularly well documented, nor is the influence they may have had on his work.

The evening John Eliot Gardiner had conceived was part concert, part lecture. Before the interval we heard a good deal more of Gardiner's voice than of his orchestra, as segments of works probably or definitely familiar to Beethoven - by Lefèvre, Gossec, Kreutzer, Cherubini, Méhul and Rouget de L'Isle (the writer of La Marseillaise) - were introduced and then played alongside passages from the symphonies. A particularly striking example of a possible "borrowing" was the Hymne à L'Agriculture by Lefèvre, in which a clarinet melody bore more than a passing similarity to that of the Pastoral Symphony. Yet in a little under an hour Gardiner was only able to scratch the surface of his subject.

The brief snippets of music that time allowed were not always enough to make a convincing argument for a particular influence, and sometimes served better to illustrate how two-dimensional the French music is in comparison with that of the German master.

After the interval the orchestra was given a chance to show its mettle in a performance of Beethoven's Fifth that buzzed with energy and vitality. Gardiner made sure that every raging internal texture was audible.