Conductors, especially British ones, who study the Tenth early on tend to become determined champions. Mark Wigglesworth has performed the Tenth regularly since a BBC Symphony Orchestra concert in 1991 brought him wide attention. A 1993 Nottingham concert with the BBC Welsh, issued on a magazine CD, won plaudits, as did their Amsterdam performance for the gathering of the Mahlerian clans two years later. This live Melbourne performance carries a little more timber but it’s consistent with a vision of the piece that was clear and distinctive over two decades ago.

The breadth and deeply etched conviction that mark out his Shostakovich dignify this Tenth with the status not of an edgy step (taken by Rattle, Sanderling and others) into a sometimes bracing new world but a retrospectively fitting culmination to an assured, and assuredly symphonic, career in music. With Wigglesworth, you can hear late Schubert in the pawky gait of the ‘Purgatorio’, and the Fifth Symphony in the two scherzos. You won’t hear any of the percussion added to Cooke’s completions by the pair already cited but plays of exhilaration and disconcertion can still be relished here through the pure energy of the playing, which has its rocky patches (such as the start of the second movement) but hardly any rough edges; if there is a Wigglesworth sound, the Melbourne orchestra are well schooled in it.

The huge bass drum punctuations of the finale, louder than ever, have transcended their origins in the funeral of a New York fireman to adumbrate a gathering of creative resources no less bold than, but apparently modelled on, the example of Beethoven’s Ninth (and Bruckner’s Fifth). Accordingly, the big tune presents less of a brief and breathtaking mirage than the start of an intricately worked finale-argument; and its eventual, chorale-like transformation in the strings after the recrudescence of the first movement’s crisis brings fulfilment, not resignation. The recording, like the performance, benefits from a healthy sense of perspective.