Noseda served part of his apprenticeship under Gergiev at the Mariinsky Theatre, and his concerts as principal conductor of the BBC Philharmonic were never lacking in intensity and sense of occasion. Given that these very qualities are the lifeblood of Shostakovich performance, I had the highest hopes for this disc, not all of which were realised, I have to say, though, curiously, some that I didn’t have were.

The account of the Fifteenth Symphony, oddly placed first on the album, strikes me as the more successful. For one thing, it is exceptionally observant of the score. Shostakovich himself is scrupulous with his articulation and expression marks, and sticking to them as closely as Noseda does brings many benefits in terms of clarity and energy. The outer movements are each deceptively transparent until they start to flirt with chaos, à la Schnittke, but they do so within the strict constraints of canon and passacaglia: control is therefore paradoxically crucial to the nervy impression of a lack of it. Many subtleties in Noseda’s phrasing keep that large-scale process on track. The lugubrious second movement is also superb in its tension and mystery, with fine cello and trombone solos, so that the eventual outburst of rage feels like an inevitable consequence of lamentation. In the Scherzo the tricky percussion-writing is nailed, though for my taste the general pointing comes across as more playful and neoclassical than with an echt-Soviet snarl.

Which brings me to more major reservations: first of all concerning balance, which has the crucial trumpet solos curiously recessed, and the acoustic, which is dry and unconducive to atmosphere. It may be unfair to make direct comparisons with Mravinsky (1976 vintage) or, especially, Maxim Shostakovich (not on CD, so far as I know, but available on YouTube), since they are rightly regarded as hors concours as interpretations, but also because Soviet recording technology from the 1970s indulged in all manner of effect-mongering trickery. But even allowing for that, the larger-than-life quality of the Russian orchestral playing, with articulation and dynamics honed to a razor’s edge, brings a massive boost of urgency in communication.

With the Sixth Symphony, I find myself more directly at odds with Noseda’s general conception. Given the abundance of espressivo markings, his cushioned approach to the opening of the first movement may be justifiable. But I found my attention wandering, which I think is because the greatest Shostakovich conductors, such as Mravinsky, know how to push intensity levels beyond the red-hot into the scalding: the very quality, in fact, to which I thought Noseda, of all people, would be temperamentally attuned. Noseda’s second movement is right at the slow end of Shostakovich’s unusually permissive range of metronome marks. Here Mravinsky is two or three notches faster, but also heavier, more driven and more in touch with the music’s scathing rhetoric. As for the finale, Mravinsky’s combined velocity and ferocity is nothing less than an object lesson in Shostakovich interpretation. Perhaps such hair-raising virtuosity was only possible within the hothouse conditions of Soviet orchestral life at the time, but I genuinely believed that Noseda might be the one to emulate it. In the LSO’s wholly admirable and never uncivilised way there is just a little too much of the concert hall and not enough of the circus for these two exceptionally circusised (don’t blame me, blame Soviet aestheticians) symphonies.