After the epic outrage and defiance of the ‘war’ symphonies, Nos 7 and 8, Shostakovich’s Ninth seemed deliberately designed to confound expectations – not just those relating to ninth symphonies (a myth which needed exploding) but the whole question of what a major composer like this should be writing at the end of the bloodiest conflict the world had ever seen. Circus music? Polkas? Something on a smaller – you might even say neo-classical – scale? Gergiev makes much of the Haydnesque deftness of the outer movements here – and where the music does hint at tragedy or merely the plaintively regretful (the gently ebbing second-movement Moderato), he is mindful of the irony that may be just a beat away.

Gergiev, for instance, makes much of the portentous trombone declamation that brings on a funeral eulogy from (of all instruments) the solo bassoon in what turns out to be a precipitately truncated Largo. That is delivered over a desolate drone in the strings – but the real kicker is that the joker in the woodwind pack cannot suppress its natural tendencies and turns his eulogy into another inane polka. Better yet, and more shocking, is the arrival of the Red Army Band in the coda of the finale, transforming the polka into a goose-stepping march. Gergiev gives that a weighty and sinister pomp. Shostakovich’s scepticism could hardly be writ larger.

The Violin Concerto is, by contrast, worlds apart: music of the night, songs and dances of death. Leonidas Kavakos plays it with controlled intensity, restrained and beautiful in the quietudes of the first movement – a cool, glacial quality which might at any moment evaporate into the ether but for the death knell of the tam-tam bringing us back to grim reality. As a reading it doesn’t have the all-out unbridled passion of a Maxim Vengerov – the Scherzo is less strenuous, less fraught with desperation (the interplay with orchestral winds is almost Baroque-like in its keenness) and the great Passacaglia, announced here with grittily determined timpani and horns, nobly invokes Bach, the emotion contained, the eternal spinning of the countersubject possessed of a more ‘intellectual’ rigour. Likewise I don’t get the unravelling of reason in the transitional cadenza – its absolute control precludes the sense of imminent self-destruction. But that is Kavakos’s way; and while you might not share it you cannot help but be drawn in by it.