Over 80 minutes of music here and a coupling I do not remember previously encountering. But more remarkable than that is the clarity of interpretative profile – remarkable not least because this is the very thing I missed in the same team’s coupling of Symphonies Nos 1 and 15 (A/09).

In the Third Symphony, the overriding priority is a sense of enthusiasm – one that has to be driven towards the manic, then shadowed by nightmarish visions, and finally colossally reasserted, one that has to be fuelled from start to finish by unshakeable self-belief. Gergiev and his Mariinsky players have all those qualities at their fingertips. True, their drive comes occasionally at the expense of technical polish. But that is emphatically a price worth paying and the performance is topped off by an inspired, fast-and-furious account of the demagogic “First of May” chorus.

If this is outstanding, then the Tenth Symphony is even more so. However many performances or recordings of its great first movement you have heard, you will be lucky to encounter one as compelling as this. Gergiev takes fractionally faster tempi than the norm, allowing for subtle expressive retardations that do not disturb the flow, and making the most of the magnificent arch-shaped structure. This he balances with a Scherzo of exceptional weight (clocking in at an unsensational 4'29" but feeling absolutely justified). There may have been more subtly exploratory accounts of the third movement, where some dodgy intonation from the horn could also have done with a bit of patching. And the finale sags slightly after the central climax, where Gergiev for some reason ignores the score’s request for the tempo to be unchanged and then has to play catch-up a couple of minutes later (after which, however, the conclusion has fantastic vehemence).

Had it not been for those minor reservations, this review would have been even more of a rave than it is. This superbly recorded disc remains, for me at least, one of the few indispensable Shostakovich CDs of recent years.