This ties up nicely – Leonard Bernstein performing Shostakovich’s First Symphony, written when he was 19, with an orchestra of young music students at the 1988 Schleswig-Holstein Music Festival. Bernstein was a first-rate Shostakovich interpreter and here’s the clearest available insight into his concept of how the pathologically enigmatic Russian composer ticked. The DVD opens with a 40-minute rehearsal in which Bernstein cogently describes Shostakovich’s “naughty boy” attitude – “would you really want to start your first symphony like this?” he asks his amused orchestra, as he sings the jaunty, deadpan introductory bars.

Shostakovich’s First was written only two years into Stalin’s dictatorship, but Bernstein is right to locate an emerging, self-defensive satirical approach in these opening bars – if Ian MacDonald’s The New Shostakovich is to be believed, he didn’t think much of Lenin either. His description of how the work gradually fills the dimensions of a “proper” symphony and arrives, symbolically, at a middle section filled with references to Wagner is persuasive. The complete performance, too, accumulates expressive weight as Bernstein holds the satire of the opening at a distance, letting the material tell its own story, before unlocking the magisterial depth of the symphony’s middle section and finale.

This version was cut only a month after his “official” reading with the Chicago SO. Hearing the two versions together demonstrates that this was Bernstein’s settled view. And watching him gently coax his young charges – especially an obviously petrified clarinettist – is unexpectedly touching. There’s similar footage on YouTube of Bernstein rehearsing The Rite of Spring in ’87: let’s hope that turns up on DVD too