Boris Tishchenko’s last numbered symphony, composed two years before his death in 2010 (a ninth was left unfinished), is a surprisingly mild affair. Surprising, that is, if you are expecting anything on the epic lines of the majority of the previous seven, or indeed anything as intense as the separate series of five ‘Dante’ Symphonies. But it doesn’t do to underestimate this composer, who was once touted, especially among his fellow Leningrad/St Petersburgers, as the natural successor to Shostakovich. Perhaps the first movement’s constant moves from innocence to corruption, followed by their intertwining, are the whole point. In fact the real clue is that the piece was intended as a complement to Schubert’s Unfinished – to be performed after it, without a break. The second movement is especially replete with echoes of that work, and the darker but still lean-scored finale, with a rabbit-out-of-the-hat B major conclusion, is presumably a modern hypothetical parallel to Schubert’s unwritten scherzo, or scherzo-cum-finale. Intriguing, to say the least.

The Tsvetayeva Songs, from 1970 but here in a refined 2014 orchestration by Tishchenko’s pupil Leonid Rezetdinov, are worthy companion pieces to the Shostakovich settings of the same poet from three years later. There are some revealing published letters between the two composers concerning choices of texts, and this recording puts flesh on those ideas.

The Concerto for violin, piano and string orchestra of 2006 has been recorded before, with a fraction more urgency and Soviet-style trenchancy, though in a less natural-sounding ambience than Naxos’s. There is a good deal more craziness – of a Schnittkean kind – here than in the other works on the new disc, albeit more within the gravitational pull of ‘familiar’ melody and harmony than in the case of Tishchenko’s Moscow-based rival for the post-Shostakovich crown. The boisterous Rondo second movement should be lapped up by anyone attuned to the hard-edged, calculatedly stupid-ironic combination of Shostakovich and Ives that became fashionable in Soviet music from the mid-1960s. Easier to resist is the Nymanesque blatancy of the finale, where irony is hard to detect.

There are occasional ragged edges in the playing, but more importantly a strong communicative presence under Yuri Serov’s guiding spirit, as we might expect from his sympathetic booklet-notes.