Shchedrin’s 2002 “opera for the concert stage” tells, in highly condensed form, Leskov’s story of the archetypal Russian life (actually several lives in one) of a horse-driver who accidentally kills a monk, and after episodes of captivity, sins of the flesh and heroic deeds eventually fulfils the prophecy that he will become a penitent monk himself.

Acclaimed at its St Petersburg premiere, The Enchanted Wanderer’s reception at its 2002 New York premiere, as at the 2008 Edinburgh Festival performance, was, shall we say, more mixed, reviewers finding it for the most part unmemorable and tedious. It is easy to understand both points of view. Shchedrin only has to underscore the scenes of contrition, temptation and lament with fairly obvious musical imagery in order to tap a Russian audience’s hunger for lost national identity; while for Western audiences, used to more concentrated doses of modernism and sharper dramatic focus, there is little to compensate for the lack of musical incident. Nobly as Sergei Aleksashkin takes the role of the Wanderer, Shchedrin gives the listener a lot of rather anonymous music to wade through.

The second disc is bulked out with excerpts from the ballet The Little Humpbacked Horse and with the familiar Naughty Limericks mini-Concerto for Orchestra. Both are talented examples of the interest in indigenous Russian culture that binds together the apparently polarised worldly and spiritual aspects of Shchedrin’s output. Whatever the intrinsic strengths or weaknesses of his music, his loyalty to those values represents a significant strand in late-Soviet and post-Soviet culture. On that basis, and notwithstanding its verbose and hagiographical booklet essays, these finely executed and recorded CDs can be counted an important document.