There are American ensembles with a more sustained Shostakovich tradition than the Chicago Symphony but the present recording, taken from the opening concerts of the orchestra’s 2018 19 season, can stand comparison with any of its distinguished predecessors, however different in tone. There is one Chicago-made Thirteenth from a previous music director, Georg Solti. Belatedly convinced that the composer was something more than a Soviet stooge, he incorporated Anthony Hopkins’s reading of the poems in translation from a London studio (Decca, 8/95). By contrast, it was only a fortnight after Eugene Ormandy had given the piece its US premiere that a young Riccardo Muti first presented the unpublished score – in Rome with RAI forces on January 31, 1970. The soloist was Ruggero Raimondi, the text Italian. The story goes that Shostakovich had a soft spot for the results, retaining an off-air cassette tape lately gifted to Muti by Irina, the composer’s widow. In her presence and with the late Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s original Russian texts restored, the Chicago revival promised great things.

At first you may perceive a lack of urgency. The opening elegy to the un-memorialised victims of ‘Babi Yar’ is slower even than Haitink’s, unfolded with reverence as much as anger. There are theatrical touches and climaxes of bludgeoning power but little of the urgent specificity and attack of Kondrashin’s live relay of 1962 (the work’s second performance). The strength of Muti’s reading lies less in its patient nobility than in the beauty and tenderness he subsequently extracts from writing that can seem sketchy or bald. Approaching his retirement from Chicago he finds unique qualities in the closing movement, ‘A Career’. For me there is no more affecting account of its musings on the vagaries of intellectual freedom and dutiful professionalism. The final bars have the poised serenity once associated with Carlo Maria Giulini, albeit not in this repertoire.

En route Muti is plainly moved by the queuing women of Mother Russia, ‘In the Store’, while ‘Fears’, ushered in by a mesmerising tuba solo from Gene Pokorny, are not easily shrugged off. With the Soviet state long gone, persecution and tyranny continue to thrive. ‘Don’t you feel fear?’ a stoic Irina Shostakovich is reported to have demanded of her audience at a post-concert talk. ‘Don’t you agree that fear exists in any society at any time?’

We haven’t mentioned the second movement, very much a heavyweight here, ‘Humour’ doubly elusive in the absence of irony. Compare Vasily Petrenko’s radically different conception, where friskiness is all. Still, choir and orchestra are on unambiguously magnificent form in the Windy City. Alexey Tikhomirov, a Bolshoi regular with the right darkness of timbre and numerous Boris Godunovs under his belt, is perfectly cast, offering the artist’s responsiveness to poetic detail rather than the documentary truth of a participant. The anxiety and directness of Kondrashin’s Vitaly Gromadsky open different doors.

This is one work for which listeners need the poems and the handsome CSO package does include transliterated Russian texts and translations. The two-channel sound, wide-ranging if softer-grained and a tad more intimate than I was expecting, is good at locating unsuspected sonic variety even in the murkiest subterranean depths. Strongly recommended.