Gavriil Popov and Shostakovich were near contemporaries and their careers have many parallels. The closest to an intersection was in the early-1930s when Popov was in labour with his long-gestated First Symphony at the same as Shostakovich was conceiving his Fourth. Both symphonies are mighty creations and both were fated to fall foul of incipient Socialist Realism (Popov’s Symphony was banned after its premiere, almost as quickly unbanned, but not performed again in his lifetime). The two composers played these works to one another, and it is hard to imagine Shostakovich’s masterpiece taking the form it did without the example of Popov’s comparably wide-ranging, though by no means as consistently inspired, work.

Imagine a palette of ecstatic Scriabin, expressionist Schoenberg, Scythian Prokofiev and early Hindemith-inspired Shostakovich, spun together in a centrifuge and hurled out onto canvas, and you have something like a picture of Popov’s extraordinary composition. Impossible to pin down, it stands as one of the great might-have-beens in the history of the symphony, and there are moments when it touches heights of creative imagination.

Ever one with an eye for neglected gargantua, Leon Botstein has done a tremendous service with this first Western recording. It takes an orchestra of the LSO’s calibre to do justice to the teeming textures, and not even they can clarify everything on what is (presumably) an unfeasibly short acquaintance with the score. In some ways the coarse-grained 1980s Russian recording put out by Olympia has even more impact. But the new Telarc shines a more penetrating light into the densely matted layers of Popov’s writing.

Shostakovich’s Op 3 is another missing-link piece in that it shows the teenage student briefly trying his hand at academic conformism, honing techniques that he was soon to use to very different ends in his own First Symphony. Once again the only competition is on Olympia, and while that label languishes in some kind of uncertain purgatory this finely recorded new disc should be snapped up with alacrity by anyone with the slightest curiosity for 20th-century orchestral repertoire.