Mark Wigglesworth has an excellent nose for this music. His cycle of the symphonies – split between Wales and the Netherlands – has thrown up some top contenders and even first choices, and this recoupling of the first and last of them conveys a satisfying sense of both the journey and its completion. Shostakovich’s beginnings in providing piano accompaniments for silent movies are much in evidence in the First Symphony. Wigglesworth’s BIS engineers have even given the piano a refreshing immediacy as the storyboard of the opening movement unfolds.

Everything from slapstick to melodrama is embraced and vividly chronicled in Wigglesworth’s performance. There are intimations, too, of Stravinsky’s Petrushka (that obbligato piano again) and the Ballerina is much in evidence in the little flute melody that passes for a second subject. And to say that there is more than a touch of Tom and Jerry in the helter-skelter scherzo is to pretty much state the obvious. I love Wigglesworth’s characterful handling of the passage coming out of the Trio where a grumpy bassoon laboriously tries to get the movement up to speed again. The intrigue, the thematic sleight of hand, the dazzling accomplishment of this piece never fails to amaze (the composer was 18) – but this Wigglesworth performance, with cracking playing from the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra, must be one of the best.

The slow movement turns the tomfoolery and melodrama on its head and glimpses the soul of a teenager who is already experiencing anger and disillusionment. Wigglesworth digs deep here and his attention to dynamics has us breathing a different kind of air at the heart of the movement. The intimations of mortality which haunt the Fifteenth and last symphony are much less than a lifetime away.

Just as Shostakovich said he felt as though he had been born again at the premiere of the First Symphony, so the opening of the Fifteenth takes us back to the nursery, to a second or even third childhood. The flippancy and childishness so well pointed by Wigglesworth (the silliness prompting that William Tell quote) is, of course, just the sort of irreverence the Soviets would have despised. Wigglesworth’s performance has a perverse logic to it and he’s so good at making a kind of sense of those passages that drift into the no-man’s-land of the composer’s imagination – like that strange meandering string fugue at the heart of the first movement.

The irony is, of course, writ large here; and, quite apart from the big rhetorical gestures that Wigglesworth’s orchestra and engineers deliver with such force, there is a quiet wryness in moments like the flippant redirection of the Tristan quotation away from the indeterminacy of Wagner’s famous chord. This piece knows exactly where it is going: towards the ticking percussion motif from his once outlawed Fourth Symphony. It’s a last laugh that is not lost on Wigglesworth.