Jaap van Zweden and Bernard Haitink have the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in common but on this evidence their Shostakovich is poles apart. The former, the youngest ever concert master of that orchestra, has recently been building a career on the podium and the Royal Flemish Philharmonic is just one of the bands he leads as music director.

Belying its conductor’s rather bullish demeanour, this is a light-footed, well scrubbed Fifth without Brahmsian ballast, the first movement introducing a cleaner sonority than is usual in this score. The argument moves quite swiftly; many gestures are precisely tailored, others rather abruptly clipped. Either way one assumes these performers don’t want the musical argument overburdened with extra-musical considerations. There’s a certain airy eloquence that you’ll find either refreshing or superficial. The natural sound makes no attempt to inflate the music-making. There follows a Scherzo wittily characterised with some novel wind and string articulation. Again the taint of heaviness is avoided.

Any performance of the Fifth stands or falls by the potency of its Largo, the music that so moved early audiences (pace Ambroisie’s confused booklet-note). Here van Zweden is clean, patient and unobtrusive. The strings turn in some impressively hushed playing which may or may not be enough. The finale breaks into their bejewelled cool with some force yet fails to deliver much of a catharsis at the close. Could it be that we’re now conditioned to expect a more politicised, rhetorical – and funereal – denouement à la Rostropovich? Over to you.