Divining the intention behind Shostakovich’s cantatas is a favourite game for commentators. Hackwork carried out with a minimum of commitment? Unsullied Socialist Realist acclamation? Secret subversion? Affirmation of what Socialist Realism might have been had it not been debauched by talentless time-servers? All those readings are potentially supported by the music, albeit to varying degrees according to the work in question, because there is no getting away from the caustic aggression of The Execution of Stepan Razin, the triumphalism of The Song of the Forests or the blandness of The Sun Shines Over Our Motherland, whatever spirit those qualities may have been intended in. Nor is there much that performers can do, beyond giving them a maximum of welly.

Which is precisely what Paavo Järvi and his Estonian forces do. Indeed, so rich is the tone of the Estonian Concert Choir that they eclipse even Ashkenazy’s lusty Latvians in The Song of the Forests, while bass Aleksei Tanovitski certainly outshines his rival (tenor Kostiantin Andrejev is admittedly rather less outstanding). Nor is the orchestra anything less than mightily impressive; not even in the hands of Kondrashin in 1965 (Melodiya, 1/69, 4/07) has Razin sounded more excoriating.

Each of those longer works has been reasonably well served by recordings. A rarer bird, however, is The Sun Shines Over Our Motherland, composed in 1952 for the 19th Congress of the Communist Party. Indefensible in almost any aesthetic terms you care to mention, this is performed here with such gusto that the assumption Shostakovich was composing with his fingers crossed seems not entirely safe.

Is it too much to hope for a follow-up, containing the remaining cantatas and the unaccompanied choruses Loyalty, composed for Lenin’s centenary and long since unobtainable on CD? There are certainly no forces I would rather listen to in this repertoire than the ones assembled for this acoustically resplendent disc.