If you’re going to play Khachaturian’s noisy Third Symphony (1947), with its 15 trumpet parts, you need to fully commit, as Kirill Kondrashin does on a blistering 1969 Melodiya recording. Kondrashin has the Moscow Philharmonic play as if it were a matter of life and death, making this zany single-movement work sound far better than it actually is. Frank Beermann and his Chemnitz-based orchestra’s soft-grained account captures the music’s grandeur well enough but without any of the necessary grit. They don’t even revel in the bombast and repetitive rhetoric the way Stokowski and the Chicago Symphony do (RCA, 9/69), which makes listening to their recording fun, at least, as if Khachaturian’s over-the-top sound world was a Soviet answer to Respighi’s Feste Romane. Listen, say, to the trumpet fanfare at 1'41" on this new disc; it’s stodgy where it needs to have rhythmic drive. And where’s the ardour in the passages of lyrical, Hollywood-style ‘love music’ that’s so typical of the composer at his best?

The Third Suite from the 1942 ballet Gayaneh fares a bit better. The strings sing their effusive lines in the ‘Embroidery of the Carpet’ very beautifully, for instance, and in general the playing has a bit more oomph, as one can hear in the orchestra’s almost unabashedly vulgar rendition of the final ‘Gopak’ – although I still prefer Kirill Karabits’s more measured, polka-like tempo in his delightful recording with the Bournemouth SO (Onyx, 2/11). But in ‘The Gathering of the Cotton’ (titled ‘Harvest Day’ here) and ‘Dance of the Young Kurds’, the rhythms simply don’t have enough snap.

CPO’s recorded sound is warm and rounded – and that’s not necessarily a good thing in music that really demands to be in your face.