Shostakovich may or may not have been kidding when he composed his non- (or is it anti-?) heroic Ninth Symphony in 1945. But Prokofiev was certainly not when he produced his Sixth two years later, explaining that it was a reminder that ‘each of us has wounds that cannot be healed. One has lost those dear to him, another has lost his health. These must not be forgotten.’ Along with the First Violin Sonata, completed just a year earlier, the Symphony both invokes and subverts the tropes of heroic-patriotic mid-century Soviet music, in the process touching greater depths and sustaining darker moods than anything else in his output.

Welser-Möst and the Clevelanders clearly understand all this. The opening gestures are properly snarling, the articulation extremely short and biting, as it is again in the central movement. At the other extreme their sostenuto – notated or not – is exemplary and crucial to the psychology of the piece, bringing out, for example, the cowering quality of passages that can sometimes pass for merely transitional. They deliver a full measure of malicious glee when Prokofiev goes into pseudo-scherzando mode, and in all three movements they make climactic moments as scathing as they should be, colouring the aftermath with louring undertones.

It has to be said that all these qualities may be found matched and surpassed on the classic Rozhdestvensky recording. (Coincidentally, it was he who conducted the Clevelanders’ first performance of the work, in 1977). His Moscow woodwind and brass may be more raw-toned and strings more acerbic, and yet together they give an unrivalled sense of how much the music matters. No team has made the last three minutes of the finale so emotionally shattering.

In addition, there are three aspects of the new issue I find perplexing. Why only 42 minutes, with no coupling? Why commission a booklet note from a senior scholar as exceptionally knowledgeable in Russian/Soviet repertoire music as Hugh Macdonald and then confine him to less than 200 words? And why instead fill the space with a complete personnel list of the orchestra and its staff?