It is 10 years since Vladimir Jurowski previously recorded Shostakovich’s Sixth with the indigenous musicians of the Russian National Orchestra in a Moscow studio. And the good news is that their London rivals play it every bit as well. The new performance, captured live in May 2013 at the Royal Festival Hall, is not SACD-encoded but sounds less desiccated than might have been expected. While Shostakovich’s great opening Largo is kept on the move (Kondrashin style), the production team fabricates ample sonic legroom. It helps too that first and second violins are placed antiphonally (Mravinsky would have approved). Some will nonetheless prefer the spaciousness of Vasily Petrenko who, like Bernstein before him, takes seriously an opening metronome mark that risks allowing the music to collapse into stasis. Jurowski meanwhile pushes powerfully through the scherzo as well, never overstating incidental detail. The finale struck me as again more than usually earnest, the aim being presumably to boost the symphonic credentials of the work itself rather than to evoke an illogical and contradictory Soviet reality.

The boot is on the other foot in the Fourteenth. Here Petrenko’s team creates an incendiary effect not quite matched by Jurowski, comparably brisk as he is in February 2006, directing what sounds like a similarly reduced, not overly polished string complement in the smaller Queen Elizabeth Hall. Though Petrenko’s youthful male soloist, Alexander Vinogradov, is not billed as a bass, his low notes are firmer than those of Jurowski’s veteran baritone, the predictably authoritative – and tonally parched – Sergei Leiferkus. Tatiana Monogarova is splendid, however, applying 21st-century poise and discipline to the timbre and attitude of the old-style Russian dramatic soprano. Not since Galina Vishnevskaya have I heard quite such committed singing in this extraordinary music. Applause is retained after the Sixth, the Fourteenth wisely left hanging in the air. Strongly recommended, with the proviso that those who invested in Volume 3 of the LPO’s ‘75th Anniversary Box Set’ will already have the earlier rendition.