Vasily Petrenko’s Shostakovich cycle continues to garner critical plaudits and no one collecting the series need feel short-changed by this patient, carefully considered Leningrad. That said, the first movement in particular struck me as curiously conceived. As under Valery Gergiev in his sometimes sullen-sounding all-Russian account, the opening theme – like much of the invasion episode – seems curiously muted. Petrenko being a conductor with a fabulously clear beat as well as a fine rhythmic sensibility, the un-aggressive quality of the articulation presumably reflects a desire to distance the music from its triumphalist political associations. He does not do flaccid.

Is the Leningrad a pastoral symphony? Petrenko would like us to think so. Throughout the performance he looks for pockets of expressive intimacy quite as much as sheer excitement, although he is also capable of eruptive urgency as in the approach to the first-movement recapitulation or the third movement’s dramatic central section. The finale at least is a considerable success, less than implacable maybe but technically tight and emotionally true. The strings are soon letting rip with the rhythmic vehemence eschewed elsewhere, the magically improved Liverpool ensemble hitting its top form.

With thoroughly respectable, slightly grainy recorded sound and detailed notes from Richard Whitehouse, Naxos’s package is well worth considering at super-budget price. Better still, however (should you be in the market for a less ‘obvious’ recommendation than Leonard Bernstein or the veteran Soviets) are Mark Wigglesworth and the BBC National Orchestra of Wales. Comparably broad tempi, wide-ranging dynamics and an avoidance of unthinking extroversion combine there with a steelier intensity and drive.