On a Tuesday evening that was just about as cold as it gets in Boston, Andris Nelsons and the BSO warmed a capacity audience at Symphony Hall with the third orchestral installment of “Beethoven & Romanticism,” this one comprising Symphonies 6 and 7. As with his presentation of Symphonies 4 and 5 last week, Nelsons, though in fact conceding little to “authentic” Beethoven fashions, again made the composer seem both a revolutionary and a Romantic.

Beethoven penned the Sixth Symphony’s Pastoral title and its movement headings: “Awakening of Cheerful Feelings on Arrival in the Country,” “Scene by the Brook,” “Merry Gathering of the Country Folk,” “Thunderstorm,” and “Shepherds’ Song. Joyful and Grateful Feelings after the Storm.” He wrote, “How glad I am to be able to roam in wood and thicket, among the trees and flowers and rocks. No one can love the country as I do. . . . In the country every tree seems to speak to me, saying, ‘Holy! Holy!’ In the woods there is enchantment that expresses all things!”

Like Mahler, Beethoven seems to have been a fast walker. He marked “Awakening of Cheerful Feelings” Allegro non troppo, yet an interpretation that kept to his 66-bars-per-minute metronome mark would race by in under 10 minutes (and that includes the exposition repeat). The water in the Andante molto moto “Scene by the Brook” is moving quickly as well; that movement would run just over 11 minutes.

Thomas Ades’s Pastoral at Tanglewood in 2019 ripped into the symphony’s opening phrase, and he went on to omit the exposition repeat, like a man who can’t wait to walk, to explore, to experience. Nelsons made that first phrase more a question than a statement, as if Beethoven were just stepping out of the coach that had brought him from Vienna and had to pause and look around in wonder. The tempo seemed a shade under the composer’s metronome mark, and Nelsons relaxed further for the second theme, which I appreciated — Beethoven’s second themes tend to fly under the radar. This was the country in warm early summer rather than brisk late spring, with firm bass lines and forward winds. The trees and flowers were already in full bloom, and the birds weren’t waiting for the nightingale, quail, and cuckoo to arrive at the brook to start singing. Already at the outset of the development, flute (Elizabeth Klein) and oboe (John Ferrillo) were turning the descending motif of bar 2 into mating calls.

The development arrived sooner than I expected, since Nelsons, like Adès, omitted the repeat. That was a surprise, since, as I neglected to mention in last week’s review, he took the outer-movement repeats in both 4 and 5. Perhaps that feeling of wonder can’t be recaptured, but I was sorry not to hear the exposition again, particularly since it was so splendid first time around. The new theme in the coda brought further enchanting birdsong from William R. Hudgins’s clarinet and then a brief response from Klein’s flute.

The “Scene by the Brook” went in much the same way, the water rippling but transparent, at a tempo that was again close to the composer’s mark, almost waltzing. Beethoven’s secretary and biographer Anton Schindler reported that the flute’s upward motif at the start of the development was inspired by the song of the yellowhammer; it’s since been conjectured that the bird Beethoven had in mind was the European goldfinch. Neither bird sounds much like the motif in question, but the principal winds have plenty to sing about here, and Klein, Ferrillo, Hudgins, and Josh Baker (first bassoon) all excelled. Although Beethoven eventually represents the nightingale with the flute, it was actually Hudgins’s liquid solo in the development that brought Keats’s immortal ode to mind. When the final section with nightingale, quail (oboe), and cuckoo (clarinet) — birds more often heard than seen — did arrive, Nelsons gave it particular attention, and the three soloists took full advantage.

Saturday’s concert saw a smattering of applause after the each of the first two movements; Tuesday there was just a momentary outbreak after the first one. Audience reaction to any movement that ends quietly is unusual; I took these instances as a tribute to the quality of the performance. 

Nelsons made the “Merry Gathering of the Country Folk” a high-spirited rustic party, with hunting calls from the horns and, in the second theme, comic relief. Ferrillo started the series of off-beat entrances, succeeded by Hudgins and then Michael Winter on first horn; Samuel Watson’s second bassoon was appropriately simplistic in its three- and four-note commentaries. The more intense 2/4 trio theme with drone and bright trumpets suggested an individual showing off at high speed. Beethoven brings the trio back to show off a second time before ending with the main section; even so, the movement whizzed by in five minutes. And at that, it seemed pokey when Nelsons unleashed the “Thunderstorm” at something closer to 46 bars per minute than Beethoven’s 40. I thought this a good choice: the wind blew that much harder, the rain lashed, the thunder from the two added trombones and Daniel Bauch’s timpani was ear-splitting, yet Cynthia Meyers’s piccolo and the anxious runs from Hudgins and Klein never got drowned out. The thunder became more distant and the rain let up. Nelsons slowed to make room for the oboes’ rainbow motif, for Klein as she depicted the reappearance of the sun, and finally for Hudgins (again nightingale-like) and Winter as they transitioned into the finale.

At 30 bars per minute, the closing “Shepherds’ Song” is a moderate Allegretto. Conductors tend to hurry here; Nelsons luxuriated almost to a fault. The shepherds’-hymn section began tentatively, as if everyone were still shaken by the storm and fearful of a recurrence. The running semiquavers in the strings were crystalline; the coda was reverent, Nelsons broadening further, and effectively, the concluding hymn of thanks. Winter’s final horn call suggested a touch of sadness come nightfall.

Richard Wagner famously called Beethoven’s Seventh “the apotheosis of the dance,” and it does dance throughout, though differently in each movement. Like Beethoven’s Fourth, the Seventh has a slowish introduction; like the Fourth, it indulges in little jokes. The Poco sostenuto introduction to the opening Vivace teases from C major to F major to E major before landing on the exposition’s A major; just before the coda, the orchestra hiccups for moment in A-flat. The A-minor Allegretto is a processional with a second theme developed from a four-note idea in the introduction to the Vivace; the Presto third movement goes at a blistering 132 bars to the minute; the Allegro con brio finale is all fireworks, with a second theme in which the orchestra keeps starting in the wrong key and having to correct itself.

Beethoven repeated the exposition in both the Vivace and the Allegro con brio; Nelsons, as in the Pastoral, omitted the repeats. As with the Fourth last week, he took the introduction at close to Beethoven’s moderate tempo mark. Ferrillo’s opening four-note oboe solo created suspense, the ensuing chords were staccato as marked, and Nelsons ratcheted up the tension, crouching intently and eyeing principal flutist Lorna McGhee as if to make sure she didn’t miss her cue. She didn’t, of course, kicking the Vivace into brilliant high gear. Speed and clarity were the watchwords from that point, the tempo keeping close to 50 bars per minute, the lilting rhythm never slipping from the marked 6/8 into 2/4. The recapitulation found McGhee, Ferrillo, Thomas Martin (clarinet), and Richard Svoboda (bassoon) frolicking in the first theme; the coda brought that hypnotic sequence where the basses play the same two-bar phrase 11 straight times.

The A-minor Allegretto is the other movement (the first was the Andante of the Fifth) Gunther Schuller had in mind when he wrote that people think every symphony has to have a slow movement. One did use to hear it as a funeral march. Nelsons was rather short of Beethoven’s 38 bars to the minute here, but the first theme did flow, and it seemed almost weightless, unhurried and yet inexorable. The strings’ countermelodies registered nicely; Timothy Genis’s timpani powered the climax. Nelsons eased for the A-major second theme, which is built from that four-note oboe solo and was highlighted by the brief duet for Martin and second horn Rachel Childers. The fugue variation was pellucid, the deconstructed coda spooky.

At pretty close to 132 bars per minute, the Presto charged with exuberant energy and high-octane timpani. For the Assai meno presto trio Beethoven drops the tempo to 84; this section has to go much slower, and it did, though the second time round the final tutti verged on ponderous. Nelsons’s ferocious Allegro con brio finale never took a breath; here he might even have exceeded the metronome mark. Led by principal Richard Sebring, the horns took their moment in the spotlight; when everybody went wrong in the second theme, McGhee and Ferrillo restored order. What started as a revolutionary call to arms ended in a declaration of victory.

The audience responded deafeningly to this Seventh on Tuesday, especially in comparison to their response to the Sixth an hour before. I wouldn’t have said the one performance was better than the other. I’ve always preferred the Pastoral; the last two movements of the Seventh, even in fine interpretations, seem too much of a battering ram. But the Seventh has always been more popular, at least in Boston, with 575 prior BSO presentations as opposed to just 321 for the Sixth. Nelsons, for his part, looked as engaged and excited as if he were conducting both symphonies for the first time.     

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.