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 Leningrad in the 1920s and he showed interest in the music of Krenek, Les Six, and the self-exiled Prokofiev. Those kinds of influences lend the work a brittle impudence at times, tempered perhaps by the guidance of Glazunov who kept a weather eye on all of Leningrad’s young Turks. 

In Testimony, Shostakovich explains that the Russian elder statesman suggested a few harmonic tweaks to the score, one of which he initially implemented. “I didn’t want to hurt the old man’s feelings,” he wrote, “but then I thought, this is my music, and not Glazunov’s. Why should I feel ill at ease? There’s a lot I don’t like in his music, but I don’t suggest he change it to suit me. I reinstated the original before the first performance. Glazunov was very angry, but it was too late.”

Rouvali captures that defiant spirit in an account that gets the balance just right between youthful cockiness and the hubris of the enfant terrible. The opening Allegretto is cheekiness personified, the orchestra responding with razor-sharp definition and deliciously characterful playing, especially trumpet and winds. It carries over into the madcap Allegro where spot on orchestral balance and richly detailed sonic engineering allows you here every jot and tittle of Shostakovich’s audacious counterpoint.

The Lento, by way of contrast, is full of melancholy with a lovely opening oboe solo. It’s never overly weighty, however, as it can be in some hands. Not that Rouvali doesn’t give it sufficient emotional gravitas, but its always in proportion to what has gone before. It’s the same with the Finale, which here feels like the natural conclusion of movement three and, ultimately, a return to the angularity of the work’s opening. Again, the playing is full of life and the ensemble tight as a drum.

To whet our whistles for the symphony, Rouvali gives us a substantial bonne bouche in the form of a four-movement suite from Shostakovich’s 1958 hit operetta Moscow, Cheryomushki. The composer tried to distance himself from what he came to regard as mere frippery – though the satire on the capital’s housing shortage was sharp as a tack – but it’s impossible not to be charmed by the outpouring of melody here. 

The suite, arranged by Andrew Cornall in 1977, runs for over 20 minutes and includes madcap gallops and souped up waltzes, and all of it is entirely hummable. I’ve heard other conductors step a little harder on the gas in terms of tempi, but by taking it a little easier Rouvali allows the listener time to wallow in Shostakovich’s lyrical fertility. The two works may be 30-years apart, but they share the exact same spirit.

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Composer: Shostakovich
Works: Symphony No. 1, Moscow, Cheryomushki
Performers: Philharmonia Orchestra/Santtu-Matias Rouvali
Label: Philharmonia Records SIGCD990