At one time touted as the natural successor to Shostakovich – and certainly the main carrier of that torch as a pedagogue up to his death in 2010 – Boris Tishchenko never quite made the breakthrough of his Soviet/Russian contemporaries such as Schnittke, Gubaidulina, Shchedrin and Silvestrov, or even of his teacher before Shostakovich, Galina Ustvolskaya. Perhaps it needed one clear masterpiece to lead the way; his superb Second Violin Concerto came close but still didn’t catch on.

The 1982 Sonata No 7 for piano and bells has a head start in its intriguing title. From the deep strokes of the beginning (even deeper and more church-like in Sedmara Rutstein’s 1983 account) to the high glockenspiel of the finale, the bells shadow the piano-writing, giving it an aura of the numinous. But Tishchenko’s expressive world is not that of Arvo Pärt, nor even of Ustvolskaya, whose remorseless hammering textures are strikingly recalled in the early stages. Instead this is unapologetically neo-Shostakovich, right down to the music-hall antics (shades of the latter’s Preludes, Op 34) that surprisingly and rather delightfully steal the stage in the finales of both sonatas here recorded.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, nor with the mixture of sacred and secular associations invoked. However, at just over 40 minutes, the duration of the Seventh Sonata does feel out of proportion to its inventiveness – a frequent problem with Tishchenko, it has to be said. Even the less ambitious, 30 minute Eighth Sonata suffers to a degree, though there is undoubtedly some fascination here in the ghosts of Shostakovich that somehow pass between the notes, realised with dedication and intensity by Stavy. Curiously, Rutstein’s much more spacious account of the Seventh (over 51 minutes!) exerts a stronger spell. To be frank, though, I don’t believe I have yet heard a performance of these works that does full justice to what they have to say.