Was Beethoven a Romantic? That could be the question prompted by the BSO’s current “Beethoven & Romanticism” festival. Or you might ask whether Boston really needs another Beethoven symphony cycle. Over the past 10 years alone, music director Andris Nelsons has led some 88 concerts that included a Beethoven work. Yet on Thursday, Symphony Hall was packed for Symphonies 4 and 5, and ticket availability for the remaining programs is “limited,” so the answer to the second question has to be yes. And on the evidence of Thursday’s performances, yes to the first question as well, Nelsons combining imagination and excellence.

The four orchestral programs of the festival are presenting Beethoven’s nine symphonies in order. Last weekend’s opening bill brought Nos. 1, 2, and 3. [BMInt review HERE]. Last night’s 4 and 5 will be repeated this afternoon. Saturday and next Tuesday will bring 6 and 7; 8 and 9 will follow on the weekend.    

Nelsons and the BSO last offered 4 and 5 together on three Thanksgiving-weekend concerts in 2018. Two symphonies running a bit over 30 minutes each is rather short measure — I was on my way to the T by 9:10 p.m. Thursday. You could argue that at least quality was not an issue, though there are doubtless BSO patrons who sit through 4 just to get to 5. One comment on the Intelligencer’s review of that 2018 Thanksgiving bill went so far as to describe the Fourth as “the worst symphony Beethoven ever wrote.”

I don’t know that there has to be a worst symphony by Beethoven or any other composer. (What would Mahler’s worst symphony be? Or Tchaikovsky’s?) The Fourth has always suffered by comparison with the Eroica Third and the “V for Victory” Fifth. Schumann’s reference to the piece as “the Greek-like slender one in B-flat major” was meant as a compliment; yet in many interpretations the Fourth runs longer than the Fifth, and its orchestration, with just a single flute, is hardly smaller than that of its neighbors. The BSO premiered the Fourth in 1881 and had given it on 288 occasions prior to Thursday. Not bad for any “worst.”

Mahler certainly paid close attention to the 38-measure Adagio introduction. Under a sustained pp B-flat in the winds and horns, the strings’ descending thirds conjure the opening of his First Symphony — it’s as if a cat were tiptoeing into an unknown universe. B-flat minor slides into B minor, making the Allegro vivace eruption into the home key of B-flat major all the more surprising. The ebullient, headlong first theme gives way to a conversation initiated by solo bassoon, oboe, and flute; the pastoral development is shadowed by storm clouds in the strings and murmuring timpani.

Of the Adagio second movement, Berlioz averred that the first violins’ opening cantabile could only have been composed by the Archangel Michael. He too was paying close attention, since he clearly drew on this movement for the “Scène aux champs” section of his Symphonie fantastique. (You might also hear the Adagio as a forerunner of the Larghetto from Schumann’s Spring Symphony.) At Beethoven’s marked quaver = 84, the syncopations pulse like a pounding heartbeat, and the lower strings’ racing demisemiquavers give love no pause. The sly Allegro vivace third movement is a minuet evolving into a scherzo, boisterous and heavy-footed, with a village-band trio. Just when it seems to have come to a close, the trio starts up again, and then when the scherzo resumes, Beethoven cuts it off at once. The perpetuum mobile Allegro ma non troppo finale brings more surprises, including a first bassoon that jump-starts the recapitulation and a coda in which first the bassoons and then the second violins and violas pretend to have run out of gas.

An “ideal” realization of the Fourth — or any Beethoven symphony — might call for the instruments of his day; the orchestral seating of his day (first violins on the conductor’s left, seconds on his or her right); a string section sized in proportion to the winds and brass; strict adherence to the composer’s tempo indications and metronome marks; and observance of his four-bar phrasing. Even conductors who achieve all this don’t invariably hit the mark. Getting the music to swing and not sound metronomic at Beethoven’s zippier tempos is a particular challenge.           

Nelsons isn’t letting strictures get in his way. No period instruments, of course, and the strings seated as they always have been in his tenure, first and second violins on his left, cellos on the right. When Richard Egarr led the Fourth with the Handel and Haydn Society Period Instrument Orchestra in 2014, he had 25 strings. Last night, there were twice that number on the Symphony Hall stage, but they never overbalanced the rest of the orchestra. And while keeping his tempos in Beethoven’s ballpark, Nelsons made some thoughtful adjustments.

The Fourth’s first 38 bars set the tone for the evening. Beethoven marked this Adagio section at a reasonable crotchet = 66. At the Largo tempo some conductors adopt, it can seem endless. Nelsons, at close to 66, undertook a dramatic exploration of Beethoven’s evolving universe, with well calibrated dynamic contrasts, the cat advancing cautiously. The Allegro vivace then exploded at something like the marked minim = 80, crisp, bracing, always moving forward. The second theme brought burbling bassoon (Josh Baker), oboe (Keisuke Wakao), and flute (Lorna McGhee), with clarinet (William Hudgins) eventually joining the party. In the development, Timothy Genis’s timpani suggested a brief thunderstorm subsiding (yet another forerunner of Berlioz’s “Scène aux champs”); then the jubilation resumed. The applause that almost broke out at the end would have been well deserved.

Nelsons’s poignant Adagio was illuminated by Hudgins’s moonlit clarinet in the second theme, McGhee’s sunnier flute in the return of the first theme, and glowing horns in the recapitulation. For all that most of the movement is in E-flat major, Nelsons’s reading bespoke a wounded heart, with Genis’s timpani adding an ominous note at the end.

Beethoven marked the third movement to whip by at a brisk 100 bars per minute, too fast for a conventional minuet. The main section goes A-A-B-A-B-A; the second time round, it’s only A-B-A, and then finally we get just a few bars of A and a whisper of B, as if the players were growing bored. Nelsons conveyed the humor of all this, his village winds sleepy and accompanied by strings playing “wrong” notes and looking for the right pitch. His finale was a graceful dance, the village winds, now chipper, returning for the second theme, the strings inexhaustible throughout. I don’t know whether having a solo bassoon kick off the recapitulation signals an impatient musician or is just another of the composer’s jokes; Baker was fine either way. Beethoven certainly teases us at the end by suggesting the orchestra is too tired to finish. Nelsons played that moment for all it was worth, a fitting conclusion to an interpretation that was as funny as it was touching.

Schumann’s “Greek-like” and “slender” reference aside, the Fourth has mostly been allowed to be itself. The Fifth got hijacked from the outset. E. T. A. Hoffmann had only the score in front of him when he wrote that “Beethoven’s music sets in motion the machinery of awe, of fear, of terror, of pain, and awakens that infinite yearning which is the essence of romanticism.” Beethoven biographer Anton Schindler claimed the composer had described the idea behind the four-note motto (and eventually the entire symphony) as “Thus Fate knocks at the door.” The resemblance between that motto and the beginning of “La Marseillaise” posited the symphony as a call to arms. The resemblance between that motto and the letter V in Morse Code — short-short-short-long — led to the Fifth’s World War II–era enshrinement as the “V for Victory” symphony, a status it enjoys to this day.

What Beethoven actually wrote is not so radically different from the Fourth. Unified by the motto, which the composer plays with throughout, the Fifth is a work of speed and power and surprises. The opening bars are intended to disorient and unsettle. At the point where the Allegro con brio’s coda ought to begin, Beethoven throws in a kind of development extension, as if he’d remembered something else he wanted to say. Of the Andante con moto, Gunther Schuller wrote, “It is, in fact, not a ‘slow movement’ at all, which seems to be the standard interpretation, I suspect, on the basis that ‘this is a symphony, and it must therefore have a slow movement.’ ” At quaver = 92, the Andante is slower and more relaxed than the Allegro con brio, but not by much. The scherzo, alternately spooky and stentorian, sees C minor extinguished in a blaze of C-major solarity; its mock-sinister return in the exultant Allegro finale is just another touch of Beethoven humor.

Nelsons’s reading here was of a piece with his Fourth. The first bar, with its opening quaver rest, didn’t suggest a triplet; the second fermata was, as marked, longer than the first. He kept close to Beethoven’s very fast 108 bars to the minute, but the second theme got room to breathe, as did John Ferrillo for his surprise one-bar oboe cadenza in the middle of the recapitulation. The texture was unblended, with winds and horns, the latter at times very bright, registering clearly against the strings; Genis, as he did all evening, fanned the flames of revolution. The final appearance of the motto saw the three quavers get just a touch more weight, and that felt right — we weren’t the same audience that heard them the first time.

The Andante con moto didn’t quite go at Beethoven’s metronome mark, but it didn’t dissolve into an Adagio, either. At something in between those tempos, Nelsons recaptured the tender, Berliozian flavor of the Fourth’s slow movement. The motto in the second theme was martial and menacing, the violin pizzicatos stood out in the first variation, the winds had sweep, the string figurations clarity. The final big tutti found soldiers and shepherdesses dancing together. Then Richard Svoboda’s bassoon had the proper piú moto acceleration, the unmarked ritard that every conductor takes just before the coda was well judged, and the coda itself sang like a lullaby.

The third-movement Allegro — Beethoven didn’t call it a scherzo but we think of it as such — sauntered rather than scampered. The second phrase marks yet another return of the motto, and on Thursday, after the horns had announced it, you could still hear their counterpoint under the winds and strings, something that doesn’t always happen. Other highlights included the glorious long cello line when the initial phrase makes its third appearance, the fugue initiated by the cellos and basses to start the trio, and Svoboda’s ghostly bassoon dance when the scherzo resumes. Nelsons built the transition into an awesome climax, but then the Allegro finale, when it arrived, seemed to go too fast. It didn’t: Nelsons took 10 minutes, which is about right for Beethoven’s metronome mark, but Beethoven meant the finale to go slower than the preceding scherzo, and that didn’t quite come off. It was a thrilling finish nonetheless; Cynthia Meyers’s piccolo soared, and I could even detect Samuel Watkins’s contrabassoon, a part that’s rarely audible. Here, as in the fourth, Nelsons gave us a Beethoven who’s a revolutionary but also a Romantic.

PS: There’s more to “Beethoven & Romanticism” than just the symphony concerts. The Goethe-Institut Boston hosted a program devoted to the Piano Sonata No. 30 (Opus 109) last Wednesday, and this Saturday, it will present baritone Randall Scarlata and pianist Tanya Blaich in the song cycle An die ferne Geliebte, with former Boston Globe correspondent Matthew Guerrieri as speaker. Next Wednesday, January 22, at the BYSO Youth Center for Music, the Lydian String Quartet will offer Quartet No. 16 (Opus 135), with Scott Burnham leading the discussion. And on Saturday January 25 at Symphony Hall, pianist Marc-André Hamelin will conduct a Beethoven masterclass.

Jeffrey Gantz has been writing about music, dance, theater, art, film, and books for the past 45 years, first for the Boston Phoenix and currently for the Boston Globe.