With this Bavarian coupling of Nos 3 and 14, Mariss Jansons at last completes his long-gestated, multi-orchestra Shostakovich symphony cycle. The pairing may not be logical but when playing and recording are this good it is difficult to single out a modern rival that’s unarguably superior. While Jansons might not rekindle the hyper-intensity of the best Soviet-era music-making he is greatly assisted in No 14 by his decision to employ native Russian singers. Should you feel his speeds at times unduly pressed, remember that this is very much how Barshai and Kondrashin used to present the piece. Neither of Jansons’s soloists has the beauty of tone of Karita Mattila or Thomas Quasthoff for Simon Rattle in Berlin (EMI, 8/06) – Larissa Gogolewskaja is one of Gergiev’s idiosyncratic Wagner sopranos at the Kirov – but they are inside the texts in a way that Westerners seldom are. David Fanning provides typically reliable booklet-notes.

At his second powerbase, Amsterdam, the most obvious “Jansons effect” has been to restore a less brash, more traditional blend to the orchestral sonority. This is not, in general terms, unwelcome, but the Leningrad may not be the right piece to show off the achievement. When the Royal Concertgebouw visited the UK with this work they won golden opinions all round yet, for all the personal involvement implied by his audible exhortations from the podium, Jansons doesn’t convince me that this is great music. For some of us, full suspension of disbelief comes only with the more subjective, interventionist interpretations of Leonard Bernstein (DG, 1/90) or Mark Wigglesworth (BIS, 8/97).

That said, if the coolly reflective, philosophical option is more to your taste you will find Jansons admirably lucid and enjoying a vast dynamic range: the first movement’s notorious invasion theme steals in as quietly as any. The actual sound of the relay, pleasing enough, is weighted in favour of the strings, and hence not always ideally clear: a few key woodwind lines get lost in the mêlée. The booklet includes both a useful, fair-minded interview with the conductor and a prefatory paragraph of lazy half-truths peddling speculation as fact.