It was an inspired idea to couple two great Sixth Symphonies that inhabit, respectively, the 19th and 20th centuries, both of them tragic, and both unconventional in their very different approaches to symphonic structure, the earlier of the two ending with a slow movement, the later work beginning with one. By coincidence, while listening to Jansons’s Shostakovich, Valery Gergiev’s Mariinsky recording arrived on my mat and the interpretative polarity between them is telling. In the opening Adagio, Gergiev’s extra breadth (18'38" as opposed to Jansons’s 15'41") not only makes for a humbling sense of desolation but the Mariinsky string-players are more overtly expressive. Sample the convergence of string choirs at 4'16" (Jansons) and 4'54" (Gergiev) and the contrast is fairly obvious. Elsewhere the tempo bias is reversed, Gergiev sounding rather like soft-option Mravinsky whereas Jansons, who in the Leningrad Philharmonic days was Mravinsky’s assistant, more approximates his master’s style, not in terms of tempo but in the quick-witted exchanges between desks and soloists, especially in the symphony’s finale, which is also far better recorded than the Mariinsky disc where, at the very end of the work, the all-important timpani are rather muffled. Jansons’s precise approach veers in the direction of chamber music writ large, which inclines me towards his version in preference to Gergiev’s, good though the latter is. But that’s just one symphony in a collection of three that will be reviewed elsewhere.

Meanwhile we have Jansons’s full-bodied, richly expressed Pathétique, another reading that brings Mravinsky to mind and that marks an overall improvement over Jansons’s exciting though less subtly expressed version with the Oslo Philharmonic. Tempi here are marginally broader than before, the playing has greater warmth and so has the recording, quite different to Chandos’s harder-edged, more resonant option. The first movement’s principal climax is overwhelming (the triple forte strings project more effectively than they do on Nézet-Séguin’s recent recording) and Jansons holds the fast pace for the close of the third movement. Given the overall excellence of the Shostakovich, I’d place this version a notch or two above the Nézet-Séguin disc, where the coupling is a series of Tchaikovsky songs transcribed for violin and piano and played by Lisa Batiashvili. Nice to have but not as musically important as the Shostakovich symphony.