This fourth issue in Mark Wigglesworth’s stop-go Shostakovich cycle is a worthy successor to earlier instalments. Fierce articulation at deliberate speed remains its hallmark, along with the widest possible dynamic range and stereo spread. Only the orchestra is new. At the risk of provoking a deluge of correspondence, I wonder how many readers will take issue with the conductor’s naively revisionist booklet-notes. He has said elsewhere that he believes in trying to make new pieces sound comfortable and old pieces sound challenging. Here his preoccupation with the oppressive political and moral context in which Shostakovich fashioned his oeuvre means that the work is seen in shades of grey and black, a sonic mausoleum for the victims of Stalinism. ‘It shows the author, the individual, in a state of solitary helplessness,’ as Kurt Sanderling once said of its fourth movement.

This may or may not be the only viable approach. André Previn’s pioneering 1973 version (EMI, nla), the Eighth’s first commercial recording in the West, reminds us that, whatever else it may be, this music is the product of a younger man’s imagination. Even Evgeny Mravinsky, the conductor most closely identified with the score throughout the Soviet period, is more highly coloured as well as brisker. And angrier.

Wigglesworth is at his most convincingly bleak in the Largo and finale. The scherzi could be more entertaining, not that the jaunty episode towards the end of the first lacks humanity; the vibrato of the trumpet solo at the heart of the second is presumably intended to recall echt Russian sonorities. The first movement is dangerously broad.

The Dutch orchestra does not have the distinctive timbre or weight of sonority of the biggest names. Instead, it gives the conductor everything he asks for right up to his self-conscious enunciation of the closing bars. Highly-charged, precise, never bland or suave, Wigglesworth is his own man.