Rostropovich’s latest account of this most emotionally searing of Shostakovich’s symphonies is a cut above most modern Western versions, including his own on Teldec, recorded in 1991. But if it’s the ultimate in emotional authenticity you hanker after, you have to go back to the Soviet classics. Not that the LSO’s attack and tone-colours are seriously wanting, but the way every one of Mravinsky’s Leningraders, and even more so Kondrashin’s Muscovites (available from Melodiya in Japan), sustains and quits phrases tells us that they know in their guts where the music comes from.

The new recording would make a deeper impression were it not for Rostropovich’s miscalculations in the first movement, the worst being at 12’25” (the entry of the implacable side-drum) where I seriously wondered whether two different performances had been spliced together, so unconvincing is the lurch forward in tempo. In the second movement, his mannered turning of corners between phrases is again infuriating, though what runs counter to the musical drama is not so much those moments themselves as the impression they give of an individual controlling presence, rather than of a dire threat from unstoppable larger forces.

On the other hand, Rostropovich’s way with the sorrowful passacaglia, and especially its final glimpse of the pale dawn of the finale, is intensely moving. And in ways too numerous and too complex to list, I’m pretty sure I’ve never heard the finale itself handled with this much measured sensitivity and trenchant conviction. For me that would be reason enough to invest in the disc. For non-specialists, I think it joins the list of impressive near-missers, such as Previn. As with the recent Fifth Symphony from this source, sound quality is not of the finest; but its dry-throatedness bothered me less, probably thanks to the generally more involving performance.