Dmitry Shostakovich’s death 50 years ago this year is prompting, as expected, a number of valuable box-sets, and the first three to land on my mat are of exceptional quality. I hadn’t previously heard more than a couple of instalments of Andris Nelsons’s symphony cycle with the Boston Symphony, now packaged with the cello concertos (Yo‑Yo Ma), the violin concertos (Baiba Skride), the piano concertos (Yuja Wang), a complete recording of the opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District (with Kristıne Opolais as Katerina Lvovna Izmailova and Peter Hoare as her husband Zinovy Borisovich Izmailov), incidental music (King Lear and Hamlet) and the C minor Chamber Symphony. Of the numbered symphonies, No 8, which was written and premiered in 1943, is magnificently played and recorded, the first movement especially, the depth of the lower strings captured with maximum presence.

Views differ as to whether or not the Eighth concludes with a ray of light. Nelsons keeps thunder-filled skies close to hand right until the end and the middle movements score handsomely for visceral excitement, though Dmitry Kitaenko in Cologne (see below) has the edge in the Allegro non troppo, which in his hands is both overwhelmingly powerful and perfectly paced. Nelsons draws delicate textures from his players at the start of the Leningrad Symphony’s central march section and the eerie, ambiguous close of the Fifteenth.

Viewed overall, it’s a cycle that honours the music as music rather than the fraught political circumstances that it emerged from. My colleague Andrew Achenbach was especially impressed by the Fifth and the Tenth Symphonies. Lady Macbeth, although very well sung, is dramatically led by the orchestra and of the concertos I’d rate the violin concertos with Nelsons’s fellow Latvian Baiba Skride as matchlessly perceptive, especially in the more desolate stretches of the First Concerto’s first movement. All in all, it’s a wonderful set that does full justice to the composer, conductor, orchestra, soloists and the singers.

Dimitry Kitaenko’s symphony cycle with the Gürzenich-Orchester Köln is also superbly recorded and if the orchestra aren’t quite in the BSO’s class, Kitaenko coaxes them to express the music’s darkly narrative elements. With them, the works sound lived in, as if well and truly under the players’ skin. Top marks must be awarded to Kitaenko’s account of the Fourth Symphony, which has rarely sounded with such an uncompromising sense of terror. It is also the one Shostakovich symphony where images of nature are part of the canvas (birdsong among the woodwinds à la Mahler), and the composer’s level of invention would rarely assume such a profound level of originality until the Fifteenth Symphony was penned many years later (another work where Kitaenko excels). Both Kitaenko and Nelsons have excellent soloists in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Symphonies (Nelsons has Matthias Goerne in the Thirteenth) and I’d say that the presence or absence of the concertos will be pivotal to your choice of recording. Both sets do justice to the symphonies.

Nelsons gives us alternative versions of the Interlude from Act 2 of Lady Macbeth but it’s Leonid Grin with the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra in Capriccio’s Film Music Edition who offers more generous selections from the Hamlet Suite and the suite from the 1955 film The Gadfly, which features the by-now familiar Romance. Also included in this valuable collection, music for the 1929 silent film New Babylon and the 1961 joint Soviet-East German film Five Days, Five Nights, both under James Judd, whereas the late conductor and Shostakovich expert Michail Jurowski (father of conductors Vladimir and Dmitry) conducts extended excepts from King Lear (incidental music to Shakespeare’s tragedy Op 58a and music for the 1970 film, Op 137), as well as the suites from Zoya, The Fall of Berlin, Golden Mountains, music for the film Maxim’s Youth, the Maxim film trilogy, Vyborg District and the 1930‑31 film Alone (74 minutes’ worth). Try the Snowstorm from ‘Storm in the Steppe’ from the latter (disc 7, tracks 22‑24) and that’ll give you some idea of Shostakovich’s vivid film-music style. The excellent Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin and Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra pull out all the stops, and as with Kitaenko’s set of the symphonies, the sound is first-rate. Both sets are offered at bargain price.

As is Supraphon’s first-ever complete set of its recordings by the Czech Philharmonic under the Croatian conductor Lovro von Matačić, taped between 1959 and 1980 in impressive stereo. Tchaikovsky’s Fifth and Sixth Symphonies are of exceptional quality: the Fifth’s Andante cantabile is warmly expressed while the Allegro molto vivace from the Sixth, as with Mravinsky on his recordings of the work, holds to a fast pace without slacking towards the end (also like Mravinsky the thunderclap onset of the first movement’s Allegro vivo section). Bruckner is represented by imposing though pleasingly transparent recordings of the Fifth, Seventh and Ninth Symphonies; there’s an airy, finely crafted Eroica and music by Wagner (a Götterdämmerung Suite) and The Story of the Flutes by the Czech composer and pianist Oldřich František Korte (1926-2014). A sure recommendation.

The recordings

Shostakovich Syms, Concs, etc Nelsons (DG)

Shostakovich Syms Kitaenko (Capriccio)

Shostakovich Film Music Edn Various artists (Capriccio)

Beethoven. Bruckner, etc Orch Wks Czech PO / Matačić (Supraphon)