Older hands may expect a heavier sonority in this music, the kind of sonic punch delivered by Ormandy and Previn, let alone Kondrashin and Rozhdestvensky, products of the old Soviet empire who might be expected to know where the bodies are buried. Semyon Bychkov is seductive mainly in matters of detail. Take those six stepped dissonances heralding the first movement's two-faced recapitulation - you'll not find dynamic levels so precisely terraced, except perhaps by Rattle (EMI, 11/95). Or that ghostly percussive patterning at the end of the second, the poltergeists of terror here notably light on their feet.

Still, graceful and civilised though it is, such music-making can seem underpowered when tension is allowed to sag, as in the approach to the strings' desperate moto perpetuo fugato at the heart of the opening movement. Bychkov nails the finale's cartoonish quality but not the full nightmare ferocity of its climax, the most ambiguous of all Shostakovich's perorations. This fresh-textured, bass-light account ought to appeal to listeners who usually find the invention overblown in the wrong way.

As in the conductor's other discs from this source, the sound quality is clean and faithful with notably well defined timpani. Packaging is highly professional, too; only the melodramatic booklet-notes fall short, stemming a little too obviously from a German original.

Not a first choice perhaps but a cool, polished alternative to the likes of Kondrashin, whose Moscow cycle has at long last resurfaced in its entirety (Melodiya, 11/94R).