With the disappearance of the old Soviet Melodiya catalogue, seekers after authenticity in Shostakovich have had to look to recordings made outside Russia by musicians closely associated with the composer. Mstislav Rostropovich’s inspirational, overtly ‘politicised’ way with this music is perhaps best experienced live, though his recordings have their admirers: a third version of Symphony No 5 can be expected soon on the LSO Live label. Rudolf Barshai, another colleague and friend, is altogether cooler, compelling attention in a quite different way.

In this company, Oleg Caetani is less of an outsider than one might think. The son of Igor Markevitch (he took his mother’s family name), he studied with Kirill Kondrashin in Moscow and had the opportunity to peruse Mravinsky’s performance material in St Petersburg. His Milan orchestra may lack the nth degree of security and tonal richness, but its musicians have been making great strides under Riccardo Chailly’s direction, can deliver real pianissimi and would seem to possess an acoustically perfect hall. It is the immediate quality of the sound that makes this disc of particular interest: we are close to the players yet there is sufficient resonance to soften rough edges and flatter the lower strings.

Caetani’s view of these scores is unfussy and unforced, closer to the smoother sort of Western approach exemplified by André Previn and the LSO than Leonard Bernstein’s brand of hyper-intensity. The first movement of No 5 takes a while to get going. You’ll notice the unusually precise articulation of rhetorical gestures, often preceded by a vocal exhortation from the conductor, but you may be less happy with the rather pinched sonority of the brass. A few will consider the playing too ragged for repeated listening. The second movement trio can bear a blatantly intrusive nudge or two, inflections that may be part of the Mravinsky inheritance. The Largo is deeply felt, returning to the patient, slow-building strategy that characterises the music-making elsewhere; the finale is again ‘serious’, aptly cathartic but no workers’ playtime. The enthusiastic applause has not been edited out.

The Sixth, also live, has many of the same qualities. Though I personally prefer a more deliberate treatment of its opening paragraph, Caetani does bring out the first movement’s Mahlerian references in unusually direct fashion and there is more genuinely hushed intensity at its heart than you’ll find in many a big-name reading. The subsequent movements are well conceived and rhythmically well sprung, more transparent than usual if inevitably less brilliant than ideally they need to be. The finale in particular is pressed a bit too hard for an orchestra of this calibre. Even so, both readings confirm that Caetani’s ENO début, a successful revival of Mussorgsky’s Khovanshchina edited by Shostakovich, was no flash in the pan. The conductor, who takes over from Markus Stenz at the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra in 2005, is clearly a man to watch. The booklet-notes include some pertinent remarks from him but are otherwise unreliable when not wholly incomprehensible.