A very revealing coupling from Storgårds. The question is often asked why it is that the predecessor to the Twelfth Symphony – the Eleventh celebrating the failed Revolution of 1905 – is so much more heartfelt, so much more affecting, than the would-be glorious Twelfth, The Year 1917? Shostakovich, we know, was immensely practised at dispensing coded protests to any and everyone with the smarts to recognise them and beneath all the hectoring triumphalism of his long-awaited ‘Lenin’ symphony was self-evident disappointment at what the great socialist revolution had achieved – or rather not achieved – at the time of writing in 1961.

‘Revolutionary Petrograd’ (as the first movement is subtitled) is all bombast and swashbuckling heroics – exciting and then some but, dare I say it, sound and fury signifying, well, not very much. Storgårds and the BBC Philharmonic give it what for and Chandos engineering does the rest – but it is what it is, superior underscoring to a series of cinematic images and it patently fails to ‘resonate’ like its predecessor. The slow movement – ‘Razliv’, Lenin’s hideaway – seems of little consequence when it should portend quite the opposite and the rhumba-like percussive tattoo signalling revolution – though a complete knock-out here (pump up the volume) – hardly summons ‘The Dawn of Humanity’. Storgårds does a Fifth Symphony on the repetitive and protracted coda suggesting the hollow promise of Soviet propaganda.

Many worlds away from that is the enigmatic Fifteenth Symphony – a valediction quite like no other. This is an enigma unfolding in the playing of it: the first movement playful and flippant with William Tell accidentally-on-purpose thrown into the mix – a wilful irony suggestive of a petulant child – and an unlikely precursor to the solo cello and trombone orations (marvellous both) of a slow movement in deadly earnest. The Wagner-infused finale is a riddle in itself with the subversion of the Tristan und Isolde quotation pointedly avoiding the indeterminate Tristan chord and instead making a whimsical departure to more familiar pastures. The ‘last laugh’ of the piece – the ticking percussion motif first heard in the renegade Fourth Symphony – is not lost on Storgårds. He and his excellent percussion section really unlock magic casements here. Rostropovich called it a silken ladder to eternity. The last note, a question mark.

Another terrific release from this source, then. I still retain great affection for the Georges Prêtre recording of the Twelfth (HMV, 11/63) but this pairing is technically in another league.