Coming so soon after Praga’s reissue of the fabled second performance of this piece under Kyrill Kondrashin (1962), where the air was so thick with defiance as to be tangible, it is a measure of the quality and power of Petrenko’s reading that it stands its ground so impressively. This is undoubtedly a big finish to his cycle, though one needs to say straight away that good as the men’s voices of the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Choir and Huddersfield Choral Society are – dense, dark and well schooled in the sound of the language – there is really no substitute for the cragginess, graininess and authenticity of Russian voices. So much of the declamatory nature of this shattering piece is close to speaking – and shouting – and the natives have been doing just that for generations. To little avail, it would seem.

That said, Petrenko’s nose for characterisation and his often startling attention to the dynamics of the piece make it feel not counterfeit at all but rather something he made earlier in his home city of St Petersburg. The serrated edge he gives the RLPO brass and percussion, the many dark hues he draws from the bass woodwinds, all of whom get to be stars in this piece, make for a thoroughly saturating sound. The passage in the first movement, ‘Babi Yar’, where vodka-swilling thugs bear down on the Jews – ‘Kill the Yids! Save Russia!’ – brings uncouth voicings and vulgar (as in ugly) trombone slides. Then there is the Ann Frank section, which Petrenko’s bass, Alexander Vinogradov, invests with empathic tenderness until the ice-breaking climax sweeps all before it. Petrenko takes no prisoners in that and the Naxos engineers thrillingly open it up to Liverpool Philharmonic Hall.

Vinogradov could hardly be more different from Vitaly Gromadsky in the Kondrashin recording: the latter really does take the whole part closer to spoken declamation, while Vinogradov finds many more secretive shadings and deploys his haunting head voice to poignant, almost unearthly effect in the third movement, ‘At the Store’, where the line ‘they have endured everything’ is underpinned with the most telling portamento sigh from Petrenko’s violins. For once ‘Fears’ is truly furtive, with its lowering tuba deep in shadow as befitting the politics of fear; and how heart-easing is that modulation in the final movement where Yevtushenko, ‘the Russian Bob Dylan’, sings in praise of those who strive but where the last word is from the chilly celesta, Shostakovich’s chosen instrument of desolation and unease.

What a stupendous piece it is and how ironical in itself that Petrenko should take the second movement, ‘Humour’ – secret weapon of mass destruction – at such a lick. Catch me if you can.