Conscious summation or not, Shostakovich’s Fifteenth is one of the most inscrutable symphonic masterworks in the repertoire. As the composer told Isaak Glikman, ‘I don’t myself quite know why the quotations are there, but I could not, could not, not include them.’ During the Soviet era it was deemed expedient to associate its first movement with a toy shop, yet in any half-decent performance the impression of childlike wonder is rapidly overtaken by knowing scepticism and a sense of the certainty of death. There are parallels with Nielsen’s Sixth but neither Shostakovich nor his early advocates appear to have known the latter and their effective approaches range from Kondrashin’s controlled hysteria to Sanderling’s near somnambulism. That late lamented maestro spoke of ‘soullessness composed into music, the emotional emptiness in which people lived under the dictatorship of the time’ and, at the end, ‘the intensive care ward in a hospital: the person is attached to various contraptions and the dials and screens indicate that heartbeat and brain activity are gradually expiring. Then comes a vast convulsion and it’s all over. The listeners feel this too, or something like it, and are very shaken.’

It would be surprising to discover that Bernard Haitink’s own conception relied on anything other than a close examination of the notes on the page. He has not changed his ideas radically since his Decca studio cycle although as he seeks to go deeper his tempi have slowed a little. What impresses, as in his recent Bruckner Fourth for LSO Live (see page 52), is the formal cohesion and unforced gravitas of the music-making. His prestigious band is in fine fettle, not always true of the LPO of 1978, whose players do not articulate the finale’s unorthodox denouement with absolute precision. The sound engineering of 2010 conveys the warmth, detail and ample resonance of the Concertgebouw even if certain instrumental solos are brought a little close and the overall effect may strike nitpickers as unhelpfully bland. The frozen quality of the reading would have been compromised by the inclusion of applause which is duly excised. Less positively, no makeweight is offered and RCO Live’s booklet-note gets tied up in speculative knots. The artwork is characteristically adventurous – a scatter of mutilated dolls against a crimson background.