Will Shostakovich’s Fifteenth remain the last self-styled symphony to gain a permanent place in the orchestral repertoire? Despite its elusive nature it has been lucky on disc from the word go. Older readers will remember the early Maxim Shostakovich and Eugene Ormandy LPs (taped in 1972) and my personal favourites, Kyrill Kondrashin (1974) and Kurt Sanderling (1978) are still in contention. Those two might be thought to represent the outer limits of interpretative possibility in the studio. Much of the Kondrashin goes at a frightening lick, deserting the officially mooted nocturnal toyshop setting for some Soviet asylum. Sanderling, daringly slow in East Berlin, seems already in the morgue.

If Vasily Petrenko’s cycle has risen to some astonishing heights, not least his rhythmically articulate, well-nigh unbeatable Tenth (1/11), there have been some misfires too. The first movement of his Sixth is taken so slowly that, for me at least, it risks losing the sense of line. It’s the same here in a Fifteenth which, except for its piquant quick-fire scherzo, is closer to Sanderling than might have been expected. The finale is broad and the second movement, deathly pale and with a wide dynamic range, is stretched almost to breaking point. When it comes to the isolated central climax, the Liverpool orchestra, while lacking the heft of big-name rivals, sounds less frayed than Andrey Boreyko and his German band although it is they who enjoy the more refined sound. The live Hänssler alternative, carefully prepared yet soft-edged, episodic and finally unexceptionable rather than illuminating, is capped by applause which the label has not tracked separately. The finale’s graceful string theme is rather too self-consciously moulded but then Petrenko’s chillier edge may not provide the best entrée for beginners.

The Second, where Petrenko keeps things moving rather more, makes an unexpected makeweight for all that its experimentalism is referenced, along with much else, in the later work. The (rehearse-record?) realisation boasts a rather peculiar basso profundo excuse for a factory hooter before the choral peroration: Gergiev opts for a siren. And it must be difficult to persuade an Anglophone chorus to deliver that unashamedly propagandist text with theatrical conviction. Russian forces have an inevitable timbral and linguistic head start there. Boreyko, more conventionally, couples the Ninth and there is nothing seriously wrong with his performance unless you insist on the weight and, at length, sheer terror Kondrashin provides. I was not sure about the pointed nudge nudge, wink wink with which the younger conductor has the pompous two-note trombone motif finally get its way tonally during the first-movement recapitulation. At least the extrovert nature of the score makes the clapping feel less intrusive. With such distinguished German radio orchestras under threat of merger or worse, it seems churlish not to welcome good but not great Shostakovich which might however travel better at less than premium price. The booklet-notes present opinion and conjecture as fact. Naxos wins there too.