Following a debut disc pairing Tchaikovsky’s Serenade with Bartók’s Divertimento (1/15), this latest offering from the LSO’s elite string group again cuts across conventional couplings, immortalising two-thirds of a concert given a year ago. Both scores are dark and autobiographical, Mahler providing additional connective tissue as arranger of the Schubert and inspiration for Shostakovich’s confessional vein.

While Rudolf Barshai gained acceptance for his Shostakovich transcription during the composer’s lifetime, Mahler’s only partly realised fleshing-out was not published until the 1980s, when David Matthews and Donald Mitchell were able to prepare definitive parts from the marked-up score unearthed by his daughter, Anna. The present performance is large in scale, retaining the first-movement exposition repeat and taking its time over the second’s set of variations. There’s no lack of character. Texturally, however, things feel somewhat desiccated. Whatever Mahler’s expectations in terms of string vibrato, he would surely have deployed a larger body of players.

In the ubiquitous Chamber Symphony the LSO String Ensemble is up against groups of all sizes, many given a more flattering acoustic setting than London’s Barbican Hall. On the plus side, the opening Largo is taken quite briskly, in which context the deadened, wispy sonority works well. The second movement’s reprise of the Jewish-inflected dance from the Second Piano Trio rages full-bloodedly, with the spectral waltzing of the third assailed by comparably vigorous, stabbing interventions. Thereafter it’s the recollection of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk (broadly paced and beautifully played by Tim Hugh) which emerges as the heart of the piece, memorialising the composer’s free-spirited, prematurely deceased first wife quite as much as his renewed sense of ideological confinement in the aftermath of a failed second marriage.

Roman Simovic has a tendency to launch phrases with a penetrating sniff but secures characterful and energetic results, the very occasional imprecision let through in the interests of emotional electricity. As usual for this label, all applause has been wiped.