The temptation for a biographer or film-maker either to build their subject up or to knock it down must be hard to resist; it’s so much more thrilling for all concerned than trying to tell the story straight. In Shostakovich’s case it could be argued that the stories we inherited from the Stalinist and Cold War eras were so twisted that only counter-propaganda will serve to restore the balance. And in the post-Soviet era the view of Shostakovich as heroic subversive is undeniably attractive, not least because it comes with the self-congratulatory feeling of somehow redressing the wrongs done to him in his lifetime. The obvious danger is that it serves merely to place a new myth beside the old one, and it’s certainly not the only plausible view.

It’s hard to blame Larry Weinstein for wanting to tap into the popular image of the composer, much as musical bio-pics have always done. After all, this is a commercial film, not a scholarly documentary, and its bias is frankly declared in the title. As such it is brilliantly put together: expertly cut between speech and music, and accurately subtitled (at least in the English). Most valuable are the interviews with Shostakovich’s surviving confidants, many of them deceased since the film was made in the mid-1990s. We hear from pupils, friends, conductors, musicologists and the composer’s daughter Galina (not his son, Maxim, and not his widow, who only knew him from the late 1950s). There’s even an oboist and an audience member from the famous 1942 performance of the Leningrad Symphony in the besieged city. Their words seem so stirring partly because of the decades of compulsory mendacity before glasnost; they shine with the halo of a faith long nurtured and finally vindicated.

Of course none of them is cross-examined or has their testimony counterbalanced, except, naturally, for Tikhon Khrennikov, whose views go against the new party line. But the film’s main weaknesses are the off-the-cuff generalities delivered by Gergiev in the back of a limousine and the proffering of extracts from Solomon Volkov’s discredited Testimony as the genuine words of the composer. (The tragedy of the Testimony affair, of course, is that some of those words may be genuine, but it looks like we will never know which.) The musical extracts themselves are on the whole less well played than Gergiev’s CD recordings yet in several instances, curiously, superior as interpretations.

The trouble with Gergiev’s CD readings, which for long stretches are utterly inspiring, is their tendency to veer into either the over-generalised or the over-particularised. It’s rather like riding in a generally wonderful car with an incurable fault. You relish the power, the sense of control, the performance under stress, the overall versatility; but you also know that at some unknown point and for no apparent reason the gearbox is liable to go haywire. Such random jolts afflict the middle phases of the first movements of the Fourth, Fifth, Seventh and Eighth symphonies, and again the finale of the Fifth. It is as if Gergiev cannot resist interposing his ego at precisely those points in the symphonic drama where we need to feel we are in the grip of a higher, irresistible force.

As David Gutman observed in his review, No 8 is particularly flawed – all the way from the first note, in fact, which has somehow acquired an unscheduled upbeat. Ten years on, Gergiev would surely make a better fist of this work. The Ninth features an unconvincingly steady first movement (the Rotterdam performance in the film is far better) and a superb central Scherzo, but a finale that pulls its punches just when it needs to deliver the knockout blow. No 6, not previously issued, has a fine first movement and a decent finale, but a Scherzo that sounds surprisingly tentative – perhaps the aim of Gergiev’s laboured tempo was to provide an effective contrast with the uproarious finale but here, as elsewhere, the urge to make his personal mark is a sure sign of an interpretation yet to reach full maturity.

This is all hugely frustrating, given that most of these performances are in large parts as fine as any Shostakovich committed to record. But the CDs are not competitive; whereas the DVD, for all its faults, is a must-have, albeit mainly for its eye-witness reminiscences.