Diligent collectors have been able to trace the history of Shostakovich’s masterpiece in detail, starting with the typically slapdash playing of the composer himself at the piano alongside Mieczysław Weinberg in 1954. From orchestral pioneers such as Dimitri Mitropoulos via slower-burn Brahmsians like Bernard Haitink to today’s East-West fusions, of which Vasily Petrenko’s Award-winning Naxos disc (1/11) is a superb example, its discography is rich indeed. My own candidate for top spot would be Herbert von Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic as captured in their Moscow concert of May 1969. The music-making lives up to the hype surrounding a historic and not uncontroversial visit.

During the Soviet era, Evgeni Svetlanov’s 1968 Proms appearances were widely considered not so much legendary as notorious. Unlike his soloist in the first of them, the great Mstislav Rostropovich, whose first-half Dvorák Cello Concerto has already been disinterred for a BBC Legends issue (7/03), the maestro was regarded as something of an apparatchik. Yet now that the Communist regime has fallen and conductors of like stature are in short supply we tend to view him more kindly. Was his attitude any different from that of the many musicians from Stravinsky to Richard Strauss prepared to compromise with the authorities to secure their own artistic power base?

The present disc has indisputable documentary significance. With Soviet bloc tanks newly arrived on the streets of Prague on August 21, 1968, the Shostakovich (on paper less sympathetically emotive than the Dvorák preceding it) risked being seen as ‘oppressor’s music’. The atmosphere in the Royal Albert Hall was palpably tense, Svetlanov launching the piece amid shouts of protest – not quite the planned disruption such as nowadays is facilitated by modern technology. It has been suggested that he went on to give the performance of his life. I am not so sure. A conductor who did much for other Soviet composers had a curious relationship with Shostakovich, presenting only selected scores in primary colours, making them seem oddly one-dimensional. He delivers a compelling interpretation of the Tenth, but the first movement has nothing like Karajan’s sense of grip while the shadowy third is surely too swift, lacking inwardness. It is fascinating to revisit the brutal power and timbral specificity of Svetlanov’s archetypally Soviet band. Yet as in his official Melodiya release, which older readers may remember from its incarnation on LP as the first version to appear in the UK in stereo (HMV/Melodiya, 10/68), it isn’t all plain sailing. Even in the scherzo some assiduously demarcated rhythms come over as jaunty and disconnected. Svetlanov’s positivism suits the finale better than the rest of the work: he always played the quiet opening of the movement with surprising poetry and finesse, and certainly brings the house down thereafter. The makeweights will be neither here nor there for most admirers although the raw-sounding Rimsky-Korsakov items are a welcome reminder of a magnificent opera too often overlooked in the West. The sound is serviceable, better than the privately sourced concerto tape mentioned above.

Flash forward to 2010 and David Afkham, the GMJO and the sound team of Austrian Radio are incomparably more refined and precise. The young conductor (b1983) first sprang to prominence in the UK with his 2008 triumph in the Donatella Flick Conducting Competition. The Salzburg Festival date immortalised here came with his winning the first Nestlé and Salzburg Festival Young Conductors Award. The orchestra is a wonderfully responsive body of young musicians but I have to say that I find the reading anonymous. Even if the Tenth is not one of the Shostakovich symphonies that requires sandblasting sonorities to make its proper impact, the expression needs to be edgier. Afkham keeps the music moving. The other-worldly pseudo-electronic timbres of Ligeti’s Atmosphères (sampled by a wide audience in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey) have regularly graced the band’s touring programmes. Here the concluding passage, in which lightly brushed piano strings fade into silence, also encompasses the sound of a passing aircraft. Applause is retained.