Recorded at the International Rostropovich Festival in Moscow earlier this year, this programme has Rachmaninov’s choral symphony The Bells at its centre. It is a terrific performance, in which José Serebrier and the Russian National Orchestra identify those telling touches of instrumentation and detail that help make the score at once so poignant, so thrilling and so moving. That fact that Rachmaninov knew exactly what he was doing when he wrote for a particular timbre or indicated a sforzando, a diminuendo or, as at the start of the finale, a special division of the strings is amply borne out here, as is his skill in conjuring up the sonority and clangour of bells from the body of the orchestra alone, without, save in a few bars, any input from actual “campane”. The Moscow State Chamber Choir is similarly alert to Rachmaninov’s expressive requirements, rich, full-throated and quietly meditative as the occasion demands. Lyubov Petrova and Sergei Leiferkus are the fine soloists in the second movement and finale; Andrei Popov in the first one sings at a fairly steady forte but his tone is attractive, his phrasing both lyrical and sunny, and he buoys up the music’s youthful exuberance. As to the companion pieces, Leopold Stokowski’s puffed-up orchestration of a Mussorgsky Khovanshchina entr’acte can perhaps be skipped over, but Serebrier himself has made an appealing arrangement of Rachmaninov’s Vocalise, Shostakovich’s Festive Overture does what it is supposed to do, and cellist Wen-Sinn Yang plays Glazunov’s wistful Chant du ménestrel tenderly.