This searing live performance of the 13th Symphony was only its second in public and according to the Soviet authorities it never happened. The bass soloist was ill – not – and the hope presumably was that a contentious masterpiece would slip quietly into oblivion. Imagine this of all Shostakovich pieces slipping quietly anywhere. The poems of Yevgeni Yevtushenko could never be silenced, though the texts were suppressed, and one in particular – ‘Babiy Yar’, the title of the symphony – would come to symbolise this composer’s defiance behind the mask of compliance.

There is no angrier piece in the Shostakovich canon; rarely has the poetry of protest been embodied in music of such astonishing empathy. The bells still toll for Mother Russia but they do so in the cause of social conscience, and no recording of the piece stares you in the face and demands attention as this one does. Kyrill Kondrashin, his indomitable soloist Vitaly Gromadsky, his male chorus and the orchestra are uncompromising in their rhetoric – and even the ‘dirty’, coarse-grained recording seems in keeping with the tinta of both piece and performance. This is music born of declamation and outrage, and the thunderous delivery of Gromadsky, the rapid vibrato in his voice suggestive of an uncontrollable emotion, seems to reverberate across the ages. There is little or no refinement in his voicing of Yevtushenko’s texts, no subtle use of head-voice to soften poignant phrases, though lines like ‘nothing in me will ever forget this’ sound overwhelmingly first-hand and suddenly, numbingly inward.

The second-movement scherzo ‘Humour’ – Yevtushenko and Shostakovich’s secret weapon, the pointy end of irony – has unrivalled trenchancy here: the strident derision of woodwinds and militaristic raucousness of brass and percussion really do laugh in the face of oppression while the shadow of fear invoked in the Fafner-like bass tuba of the fourth movement is nail-biting in its tension, truly like waiting for that knock on the door in the dead of night. I would only question Kondrashin’s slightly hurried tempo in the hopeful transition into the leavening final movement, ‘A Career’. Otherwise a startling document of very troubled times and inescapably a reflection of what is happening in Russia at this very moment.

The fragments from Prokofiev’s would-be celebration of the 20th anniversary of the Revolution, October, seem so ludicrously thin and jingoistic by comparison: the very stuff of propaganda, all hectoring rhetoric replete with megaphone proclamations, sirens and, of course, a sentimental tub-thumping tune for victory. The perfect foil of a coupling. I wonder if some kind of point is being made by not printing the texts. That, after all, is what the Soviets did at the world premiere of the 13th Symphony.