Here are two of the more unusual yet also more welcome releases for Shostakovich’s centenary year. His gleeful music for the cartoon film of Pushkin’s Tale of the Priest and his Worker, Balda has been recorded before but not in this careful edition prepared by his pupil Vadim Bibergan. It dates from the year after Shostakovich’s completion of Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, from whose satirical aspects it borrows liberally. Again, various concert selections, and even a ramshackle symphony, have been made out of the opera but this is the first recording of the composer’s own suite, which is drawn from the three most immediately engaging of the interludes.

In so-so performances probably none of these pieces would make urgent demands on anyone’s attention. But Thomas Sanderling clearly has an outstanding feeling for this side of Shostakovich. True, in the Lady Macbeth Suite there isn’t quite the swagger or abandon of Rostropovich and the LPO in their legendary recording of the entire opera, and not all the singing in The Tale of the Priest is of the absolute finest, but the rhythmic pointing and characterisation are still a joy to hear.

Satire of various hues is also the running theme on the disc devoted mainly to songs from Shostakovich’s embittered last 15 years. These have been orchestrated with a faultless grasp of the idiom by Boris Tishchenko, the composer’s favourite pupil from the early 1960s, and in the case of the self-pillorying Preface, by Leonid Desyatnikov (a nice touch on his part to bring in the chorus just to sing the composer’s name). In all of these Sergei Leiferkus bends and shapes his voice to the words and to the musical line so as to administer a double dose of causticity, and Sanderling makes the orchestra spit and curse to properly alarming effect. They also give themselves over body and soul to the suite of eight waltzes from film scores, and recording quality throughout both discs is absolutely outstanding. Huge fun, and many varieties of it.