A second ‘first’ recording of Shostakovich’s unfinished Violin Sonata of 1945? The explanation is that Sasha Rozhdestvensky and Jeremy Menuhin were in the studio on January 8 and 9, 2015, while Linus Roth and José Gallardo followed a fortnight later, each pair unbeknown to the other. Then the Challenge Classics disc came out a couple of months before this new one from First Hand Records.

Rozhdestvensky and Menuhin take a more flowing tempo, certainly closer to my idea of the score’s Moderato con moto, and they are more warmly recorded. A few bars not available to Roth and Gallardo at the time are added, and a little tailpiece added by the violinist’s famous father, Gennady, brings the movement to an artificially rounded conclusion (one likely reason that Shostakovich abandoned the project is that it was shaping up to be over-long).

The Sonata Shostakovich did complete (in 1968) is one of his finest yet also most forbidding creations. Rozhdestvensky and Menuhin are alive to the elusive principal characters of its three movements – respectively watchful, strenuous and increasingly maddened yet implacably disciplined. There have been interpretations that cover a wider emotional gamut but this one is still distinguished and moving.

The remainder of the disc will be familiar only to those who have collected Shostakovich rarities on LP. The Symphony of Psalms transcription, made around 1930, was initially for Shostakovich’s private study and later for the instruction of his pupils; efficient and functional, it invites the unfussy but scrupulously prepared playing it receives here. Tsyganov’s transcription of the Andantino from the Fourth Quartet is a pleasing but inconsequential exercise. The Braga Serenade, transcribed in 1972 in connection with plans for an opera on Chekhov’s The Black Monk that otherwise never got past the libretto stage, should really be sung much more delicately than it is here. But that detracts little from a disc that should be of outstanding interest to Shostakovich lovers.