Having seen and heard Vasily Petrenko’s work in Liverpool almost from the beginning, I can testify to his dramatic impact, which this new issue amply confirms. I cannot imagine any of the RLPO’s previous principal conductors getting such long sustained lines from the strings in the opening pages – so crucial to setting the tone and the scale of Shostakovich’s wartime epic – or such weight of tone and idiomatic articulation in the second movement, such bite in the savage third, and such tense inwardness in the following passacaglia. The way Petrenko follows the finale’s course away from its central confrontations towards its exhausted, wary truce rings as true as in any recorded version I can recall. So there are the makings of a great interpretation here, and at bargain price the disc is clearly recommendable.

But I put that compliment rather backhandedly, because in each of the first three movements I feel Petrenko fails to make the most of the drama he has so brilliantly initiated. In the first, he broadens fractionally after the entrance of the side drum (around 12 minutes in), accommodating the increasing rhythmic density rather than pushing through to the central climax. In the second, he keeps the pulse steady in the piccolo-led section, where the score asks for two notches faster, flattening out a crucial structural contrast. And in the third, the trumpet’s circus-like trio section theme is surely far too civilised. As a section the trumpets also lack the Soviet-style paint-stripping fortissimo that Shostakovich surely relied on at the apex of the first movement. There is a life-and-death struggle between chaos and survival in this symphony and I wish Petrenko had given the forces of destruction slightly freer rein.

All this may be a case of not pushing his players beyond their limits, rather than any fundamental flaw in Petrenko’s conception. At any rate, it is the reason why I greet this excellently recorded disc with warm rather than frenzied enthusiasm.