The BSO’s January Beethoven symphony cycle comes to a close this weekend with the Eighth and Ninth. It’s not a pairing I recall seeing very often, though Lorin Maazel did them together the last time the BSO offered a Beethoven symphony cycle, back in 2009. (Then music director James Levine was to have conducted the series, but a protracted recovery from back surgery required Maazel and Raphael Frühbeck de Burgos to fill in.) They make an intriguing duo, Beethoven’s shortest symphony and his longest, his most humorous and his most serious, the one harking back to Haydn, the other looking forward. Friday afternoon at Symphony Hall, Andris Nelsons capped three weekends of stellar interpretations.

The F-major Eighth is not one of Beethoven’s most revered symphonies, though the BSO’s Henry Archive shows a respectable 307 previous performances, more than for the Fourth and not far behind the Pastoral. The Allegretto scherzando second movement may have been inspired by Haydn’s Clock Symphony, but to some ears it sounds like an affectionate parody of the metronome, which was just being developed when the symphony premiered in 1814. The tick-tock motif, which actually first turns up in the opening Allegro vivace e con brio, persists to the end. Carl Czerny is said to have asked Beethoven why the Eighth was less popular than the Seventh and received the reply “Because the Eighth is so much better!” Beethoven might not have been joking.

Nelsons established a jovial mood, relaxed but not casual, with the emphasis on surprise rather than speed. The first theme of the opening Allegro vivace e con brio swaggered; Josh Baker’s bassoon started the second theme in the wrong (for sonata form) key of D major before the winds herded everybody back into the proper C major, and of course in the exposition repeat (which Nelsons took), the same mistake got made. The development found the principal winds taking up the first theme in canon, bassoon (Baker) to clarinet (William R. Hudgins) to oboe (Keisuke Wakao) to flute (Elizabeth Klein) before the tick-tock motif reasserted itself; in the recapitulation it was the strings that landed in the wrong second-theme key before the winds came to the rescue. Nelsons conveyed Beethoven’s humor through dynamic contrast and sly phrasing, right down to the coda, which ends with a whisper rather than a bang.     

The Allegretto scherzando, tick-tocking away, catches you off guard by going straight from the exposition to the recapitulation, where there’s yet another wrong-key entrance. In the coda, the metronome appears to break down, and when first a gentle and then a violent shake fails to revive it, the luckless mechanism gets destroyed. Nelsons afforded this moment ample room to register. But Beethoven might as well have subtitled the following Tempo di menuetto “The Metronome Strikes Back,” since it tick-tocks from the get-go. The thumping rhythm suggests a Ländler, but Nelsons gave the movement grace and sweep, and then in the trio he stopped beating, leaned back with a hand on the podium rail, and luxuriated in the waltzy duet between the rustic horns of Michael Winter and Austin Ruff and Hudgins’s clarinet.

Beethoven empties his bag of tricks into the Allegro vivace finale: a first theme that starts pp and then is repeated ff with a rogue C-sharp that keeps trying to hijack this F-major movement into F-sharp minor; a false exposition repeat and a false start to the recapitulation; a trio of wrong-key entrances; and a triplet motif that recalls the shaking of the metronome in the Allegretto. In the development the basses even bring the proceedings to a momentary halt with the triplet motif, as if the metronome were reminding us what we did to it. Nelsons might not have hewed to the composer’s 80 bars to the minute here, but as in the first movement he compensated with textural clarity, crisp rhythms, pointed phrasing, and minute detail. At one juncture he “conducted” the tick-tock rhythm by swinging his elbows back and forth. In the long coda, where F major finally wins out, he clutched the baton in his left hand and punched home the final bars with his right fist.  

The Ninth, for all that it’s become the cornerstone of Western music, still poses riddles, especially in the opening Allegro non troppo e un poco maestoso. Unlike the first movement of Beethoven’s other most popular symphonies — 3, 5, 6, and 7 — this one has no hummable tunes. The introduction, with its lonely pair of French horns in open fifths over tremolo-like sextuplets in the second violins and cellos, might conjure the beginning of Alfred Lord Tennyson’s “The Eagle”: “He clasps the crag with crooked hands; / Close to the sun in lonely lands.” Then when the full orchestra bursts in with the plunging D-minor first subject, dropping two octaves in a heartbeat, you might hear the poem’s last line, “And like a thunderbolt he falls.” The second-theme complex is elusive and Protean, the development desultory, as if the eagle had flown and the music were scanning the sky for him. He returns, out of nowhere, for the recapitulation, which is predatory despite being in D major. The coda finds him back on his crag, looking as enigmatic as ever, even as the music subsides into a funeral march for his victim.

Friedrich Schiller’s “An die Freude,” too, has more quirks than you might remember. “All men will be brothers” apart, he congratulates the man who’s won a goodly woman for his wife while admonishing the one who knows nothing of brotherhood or wedlock to “steal weeping away from our band.” The fruit of the vine is “a friend tested in death.” (No mention of beer!) The serpent is accorded ecstasy, even as the cherub stands before God. And Beethoven seems to have doubts about “Above the canopy of the stars a loving Father must dwell . . . Beyond the stars he must dwell,” since his setting of the final “wohnen” dissolves in the emptiness of the universe rather than the glory of the stars. What Schiller wrote as a statement sounds like a question, and it’s answered by a return to “Freude, schöner Götterfunken” in a jaunty 6/4, the composer more comfortable with Joy than with God, and with his feet on the ground.

Then there’s the tempo controversies. Beethoven notates the Molto vivace scherzo at 116 bars per minute, no problem for most conductors, but 58 for a trio marked Presto seems impossibly slow, and the alternative (assuming a transcribing error) of 116 impossibly fast. In the third movement, he notates the 4/4 Adagio molto e cantabile at a quick (for an Adagio) 60 crotchets to the minute and the 3/4 Andante moderato only marginally faster, at 63. The “Schreckensfanfare” (Richard Wagner’s word for it) that opens the finale goes at 66 bars to the minute in some sources and 96 in others. It’s thought that, due to another transcribing error, the slow 42 bars per minute for the “Turkish March” was meant to be 84. Beethoven may even have intended to change the slowish crotchet = 60 for the Prestissimo final bars to 88.   

Benjamin Zander, among others, has suggested what this symphony sounds like at Beethoven’s tempos, first in a 1991 recorded performance with his Boston Philharmonic Orchestra and then in a 2017 recording with the Philharmonia of London. On Friday, Nelsons went his own way, to good effect. The Tanglewood Festival Chorus entered along with the orchestra, no scores in hand, something of a surprise, since they’ve tended to be on-book since choral director James Burton was appointed in 2017. The Ninth does end every BSO summer season at Tanglewood, so the TFC certainly knows it well.

Strict observance of Beethoven’s 44 bars per minute for the Allegro non troppo would produce a timing of about 12:30. Zander takes about 13 minutes in his two recordings; Nelsons, at closer to 16, accorded the movement power and shape while hinting at the composer’s “un poco maestoso.” He underlined the moment where the shift to D major negates the false exposition repeat and then the one in the development where the fugue starts to dissipate. Horizontal and vertical were in balance throughout; if the eagle didn’t whoosh like a peregrine falcon, it still soared. Beethoven doesn’t mark the funeral march as such but its arrival is unmistakable. Nelsons slowed dramatically, as if to suggest that the movement has crashed and burned.

The Molto vivace, too, balanced forward momentum against Timothy Genis’s pounding timpani. It marched, and the Presto scampered at a tempo fast enough to sound like a proper trio and comfortable enough to let Richard Sebring’s horn and the principal winds — Lorna McGhee, John Ferrillo, Hudgins, and Richard Svoboda — shine in their thematic statements and counterpointing crotchet runs.

At this point the vocal soloists entered: soprano Sara Jakubiak, mezzo Tamara Mumford, tenor David Butt Philip, and baritone Andrè Schuen. The Adagio molto e cantabile then unfolded at its own poignant pace. Zander in 1991 whipped through this movement in under 11 minutes; Leonard Bernstein, in his 1989 “Ode to Freedom” performance in the Berlin Schauspielhaus, took over 20. Nelsons clocked in at about 15, but there was nothing middling about his tender, focused interpretation, the Adagio striving to hold back time, the Andante running on relentlessly. Something about his pause at the shift to G major for the return of the Andante seemed to signal that we’d be hearing this subject for the last time. Rachel Childers glowed in the new theme that Beethoven, for reasons that remain unclear, wrote for the fourth horn. The slow waltz in 12/8 achieved a measure of serenity, undeterred by the Napoleonic warning shots from the horns and trumpets.

Nelsons’s finale, which clocked in at a reasonable 24 minutes, proved another triumph for common-sense interpretation of Beethoven’s tempos. His “Schreckensfanfare” didn’t need to go at a blur to sound horrific. The cellos and basses offered forthright rejections of the dissonance and the fragments from the first three movements before embracing the new “To Joy” theme, which built to a fervent march. Barely glancing at his score, Schuen offered a heroic “Freude schöne Götterfunken,” clear in diction, natural in delivery; the vocal quartet complemented one another without blending into mush, and I could make out every word from the TFC (perhaps in part because the text is so familiar). The “Turkish March,” somewhere between the walking parody of Beethoven’s 42 bars per minute and the gallop of the hypothetical 84, had a jaunty spring; the pace allowed Butt Philip to do justice to his “Froh” solo and the orchestra to negotiate the fugue properly. Genis’s timpani propelled the return of “Freude schöne Götterfunken”; the ethereal vision of the Creator had weight and substance; the 6/4 double fugue, which some conductors rush, sauntered. The closing bars went at a true Prestissimo, Nelsons making it seem this symphony couldn’t finish any other way.

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.