If you are lucky enough to live in London, or Gothenburg for that matter, you will doubtless have come across Santtu-Matias Rouvali, the dynamic, 40-year-old Finn who heads up the Philharmonia Orchestra and, until last season, helmed the Gothenburg Symphony. Rumour has it he’s high on the list to succeed Franz Welser-Möst in Cleveland.

Rouvali is a musician’s musician – he used to be a percussionist and can rock out with the best. He’s also a livewire act on the podium, bringing scores to life in ways that constantly surprise and invariably excite. It makes him ideal for Shostakovich, especially in a work like the mercurial First Symphony.

The 19-year-old composer wrote it as a graduation piece and it was first performed by the Leningrad Philharmonic under Nicolai Malko in 1926. Bold, accessible, original and masterfully orchestrated, it won him instant fame, being taken up immediately by Bruno Walter in Berlin, by Stokowski and Klemperer in 1928, and in 1931 it was conducted by Toscanini.

Although politics at the Leningrad Conservatory prevented the young Shostakovich from hearing much by Stravinsky, both Bartók and Hindemith came to...