Shostakovich’s two piano sonatas encased in works by older and younger Soviets and a passionate sympathiser from the West make for an attractive and revealing programme, whatever their musical and personal relationship to him. “Comrades” those other composers were, in one sense. Yet Shostakovich would have been reluctant to acknowledge the apparatchik Kabalevsky as such, and his contact with Myaskovsky was sporadic and not marked by conspicuous mutual understanding. Shchedrin certainly liked to portray himself as having the master’s blessing, but absence of comment from Shostakovich on the gift of Ronald Stevenson’s massive Passacaglia on “DSCH” leaves room for doubt as to his approval.

Kabalevsky’s Third Sonata is by no means his most trivial work; yet it is typical of him in its derivative invention (indebted above all to Prokofiev) and its favouring of shallow effect over substance. Myaskovsky’s Song and Rhapsody, composed in wartime exile in Tbilisi, are unpretentious in their Rachmaninov-like wistfulness and definitely worth recording. Whether the same could be said of Stevenson’s rambling Recitative and Air, composed for Shostakovich’s 70th birthday but turned by his death into a tribute piece, or of Shchedrin’s Concerto for Piano Solo, a nine-minute jeu d’esprit reworked in 1999 from his much earlier orchestral Chastushki (“Naughty Limericks”), may be a matter of opinion; neither has worn well, in my view. But McLachlan is certainly a committed and agile advocate, as he is of all the works on the disc.

He gets his fingers and brain round the sinew-wrenching demands of the First Shostakovich Sonata with admirable aplomb, though others have been able to bring out rather more colour and eloquence, despite the forbidding surfaces. His account of the Second Sonata is rather less successful, lacking a degree of fluency and fantasy in the outer movements and of flexibility in the Largo. Recording quality is not of the finest: as captured here, the Whiteley Hall of Chetham’s School, where McLachlan heads the keyboard department, is acoustically unappealing. All the same, the concept of the issue and much of its execution are to be admired.