Shostakovich’s Thirteenth is sonically the most austere of all his symphonies: it features a bass soloist, a male choir and an orchestra that is given a palette of timbres unusually subdued for the composer. Its profound darkness and bitter sarcasm are only rarely penetrated by faint rays of light. The symphony is best known for its first movement, ‘Babiy Yar’, and its courageous stand against anti-Semitism. It is also a kind of purgatory for Shostakovich, in which he renounces his own compromises with Stalinism. He expressed this not in his own words, but through the verses of Yevgeny Yevtushenko, a Soviet poet of the times who courted controversy without going so far as to be a dissident. There is criticism and biting commentary, but this is always balanced by an optimism that can sound glib today, or even distasteful. But what can we do? As one Russian saying puts it, you can’t start dropping words from a song.

Arvo Pärt’s De profundis serves as a perfect overture to the Thirteenth, matching it in mood and introducing us to the beautiful velvet sound quality of the Estonian National Choir. This legendary ensemble is the true star of the disc, never failing in colour or clarity, and offering perfect Russian diction in the symphony. The soloist, Albert Dohmen, is not so authentic in his pronunciation but his painstaking delivery of the lines conveys all the enjambments and caesuras accurately. His voice is not the booming bass that we often encounter in this part but rather a mature and characterful bass-baritone, offering not only weight but also vulnerability when it is needed. As with many lieder, the singer has to switch from narrative passages to the words of a character, and Dohmen performs these switches with great conviction (they are especially challenging in the first movement). At times we can only admire how he colours a single note to express the intense emotional content. Even where there is a sense of strain, this seems to be appropriate to the expression of the text, and entirely convincing.

John Storgårds has shown his affinity for the composer in every disc of this complete series of the Shostakovich symphonies (still in progress). Here, he does not strive after extremes or try out any special effects: the slow music does not drag and the climaxes are not harrowingly expressionistic. There is long-range tension and small-scale subtlety, especially in the ruminative links between the movements, where we can easily imagine Shostakovich’s authorial voice, all the more striking because the symphony was written at a time when Shostakovich was probing his own conscience.