Matthias Goerne and Mikko Franck are embarked on a series of Shostakovich recordings for the Alpha label of which this may prove to be the most valuable, neither work being over-represented in the lists. At first sight the choice of a purely orchestral makeweight looks odd, the more so because the symphonic poem October was conceived to mark the 50th anniversary of the October Revolution. That said, it comes too late in the composer’s career for such an utterance to be taken entirely at face value. In its opening section, plainly derived from the Tenth Symphony, Franck is not as long-breathed as Veronika Dudarova in a 1982 Melodiya recording once available via Olympia. Nor is he quite as intense in the seemingly conformist elements indebted to the Eleventh. The main tune is the ‘Partisan Song’ from an old film score. Whatever the intention, Franck and his orchestra make the piece sound less perfunctory than swifter Western run-throughs and Radio France’s sound team cannot be faulted.

Matthias Goerne has been singing the Suite on Verses of Michelangelo Buonarroti for many years, both in the original version with piano and in the composer’s orchestration, which arguably makes the cycle as viable a candidate for inclusion in his symphonic canon as some of the actual symphonies. Returning to the timeless themes of loss, death and the creative artist in conflict with authority, this elliptical, self-plagiarising score was written in 1974 for Yevgeny Nesterenko, a more enthusiastic Party member than Shostakovich himself. His authentically sepulchral bass was showcased in a Gramophone Award-winning collaboration with Maxim Shostakovich and the Moscow Radio Symphony Orchestra (HMV Melodiya, 5/77). However, only Nesterenko’s earlier version with Evgeny Shenderovich as pianist seems to have made it on to compact disc (Melodiya, 12/09).

Some non-Russian interpreters have tried to cut loose from the songs’ Mussorgskian moorings by presenting the sequence in Italian. Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau did so with Aribert Reimann (Teldec, 1/89), Gerald Finley with the orchestral accompaniment of Thomas Sanderling’s Helsinki Philharmonic (Ondine, 7/14). Goerne’s method is different, compensating for his lack of vocal granite with ageing bass-baritonal velvet, a wider vibrato and a lieder specialist’s detailed sensitivity even with the texts in an unfamiliar language. He included three of the settings in a recital with Daniil Trifonov (DG, 10/22); the legato of ‘Night’ is less sheerly beautiful in Paris, the line moving with greater urgency against Shostakovich’s radiant orchestral backcloth. Elsewhere the reimagined accompaniment can be shockingly spare. Quoting from a piano miniature set down at the age of nine, the Suite concludes with an ambivalent postlude giving voice to a dead child through the power of art. Is Goerne perhaps too self-conscious a standard-bearer or a welcome breath of fresh air?

Alpha’s attractive booklet presents the Abram Markovich Efros translation of the verses (as set by Shostakovich) in Cyrillic, French and English. It was the composer who provided the terse movement titles.