If their brutalisation of Prokofiev’s Third Piano Concerto is anything to go by, Valery Gergiev’s partnership with Denis Matsuev threatens to bring out the worst in both artists. The conductor’s earlier Prokofiev concerto collaborations with Alexander Toradze are sometimes criticised for their heavy-handedness but this is something else again. Matsuev’s volcanic virtuosity overshadows his subtler side to an extent one might have thought impossible in this repertoire, while unsympathetic miking lends his piano a hard, bright dazzle. Perhaps it was because I had come from listening to two relatively self-effacing advocates of the work that such a high-speed, high-decibel harangue seemed so often beside the point. This is after all music only partly Russian and never ‘Soviet’ in spirit. In St Petersburg in 2012 there are passages in which every accent and rhythmic nuance is made crystal-clear, others in which the stabbing emphases make little sense, the general clamour not so much thrilling as exhausting. Matsuev has an unarguably staggering technique. But then so too does Nikolai Lugansky in his altogether quieter rendering under Kent Nagano. Jean-Efflam Bavouzet is different again, dapper and insouciant. Neither merely hammers away.

Raucous as it is in spots, Gergiev’s latest performance of one of his favourite symphonies proves less extreme. At the start of the first-movement development, activity is stilled and the maestro coaxes a surprisingly Romantic response from the Mariinsky strings, the first of several such moments. Set alongside his earlier reading with the LSO, part of a variable, sometimes blazing Prokofiev symphony cycle captured live in 2004, Gergiev would appear to have mellowed, his first and third movements less ruthlessly driven. Just don’t expect the smoother flow promoted by the Westerners cited below. The interpretation remains unambiguously Russian, a thing of dramatic gestures and rough-edged sonorities. The symphony alone was recorded away from the orchestra’s home base during 2012’s Moscow Easter Festival. Applause is excised.