‘Vengeance is mine, I shall repay’ is grimly inscribed on the opening page of Rachmaninov’s First Symphony. Each movement opens with a doom-laden four-note motif, and doom certainly surrounded the symphony’s birth. Its 1897 premiere, conducted by Glazunov (who was probably drunk), was a disaster. César Cui bitterly criticised it, likening it to a musical depiction of the seven plagues of Egypt. Rachmaninov’s confidence was shot to pieces to the extent that he was unable to compose anything large-scale until his Second Piano Concerto in 1901. He intended to revise it, but when he emigrated from Russia in 1918, the score was left behind.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Valery Gergiev’s tenure as Principal Conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra was at its strongest in Russian repertoire and this release completes a superb Rachmaninov symphony cycle gradually released on LSO Live. It’s a taut, gripping account, Gergiev often pushing the accelerator harder than Mariss Jansons and Mikhail Pletnev in their more expansive Russian recordings. Strings dig in hard but are also capable of sugary swooning and sighing, with some lovely muted playing in the Larghetto. The LSO brass swagger infectiously in the bombastic finale, and demonic forces are at play in the cataclysmic tam-tam clashes in the symphony’s closing bars. The weighty recording has great presence, though it also captures Gergiev’s familiar podium gurgles and groans.

The disc is completed with Mily Balakirev’s sultry tone-poem Tamara, recorded at the same Barbican concert in a feverish performance sometimes lacking a little finesse. However, the opening scene ripples with sensual anticipation as the princess Tamara (from Mikhail Lermontov’s poem) entices passing travellers from her tower overlooking the gorge. Balakirev in oriental style is always fun and this is a welcome, if bruising encounter.