It’s a while since someone had the bright idea of bagging a multi-maestro Shostakovich symphony cycle from Mikhail Pletnev’s Russian National Orchestra. Two of the featured guest conductors, Paavo Berglund (No 8; A/06) and Yakov Kreizberg (Nos 5 and 9; 8/07), are no longer with us while Vladimir Jurowski (Nos 1 and 6; 7/06) has since remade his Sixth with another band. Undaunted, the series marches on sporadically with cutting-edge sound and consistently themed cover art. Accompanying documentation, once a weakness, is now top-notch: the present instalment has transliterated texts and translations plus a thoughtful, lucid note from Pauline Fairclough.

Less predictable is the style of performance. Under Pletnev’s own direction, Nos 4 and 10 (9/18) proved oddly somnambulistic. At the helm this time is Kirill Karabits, who toured the USA with the orchestra last year having evidently established a rapport with the players by November 2017, when the present sessions took place. If the scale is not quite what one might have expected, this is partly the consequence of capturing the refined, relatively contained sound of today’s RNO in a realistically rendered studio acoustic. It is also a conscious interpretative choice. Climaxes have the appropriate visceral clout but Karabits, friskier and edgier than his colleague, sees the music as human drama as much as sonic mausoleum. Expect transparent textures, greater fluidity of tempo and the occasional touch of levity from the brass.

The victims of Babiy Yar are memorialised effectively yet without the grand, unremitting dourness of Bernard Haitink (Decca, 5/86) or Riccardo Muti (CSO Resound, 4/20). The following Scherzo fairly bounces, Karabits’s indigenous choral forces an obvious asset where Muti, admirable in other respects, seems to miss the music’s brittle irony. As throughout, soloist Oleg Tsibulko is admirably responsive albeit with a leaner, drier timbre than the overwhelming Bolshoi bass-baritones of old. Compare Arthur Eisen in Kirill Kondrashin’s studio recording (HMV, 4/73) – Tsibulko is of course more realistically balanced.

Although no one is likely to trump Kondrashin’s intensity, Karabits reaffirms the viability of a more mobile view of the score. ‘A Career’, the final setting, proceeds with complete naturalness, its flow dictated by the twists and turns of Yevtushenko’s ironic text. With Muti in Chicago what registers is the poignancy of the composer’s lilting instrumental frame. Here a quintessentially Russian band, two Moscow-based choirs, a Ukrainian conductor and a Moldovan baritone offer authenticity of the best post-Soviet kind. A Thirteenth to live with.