Lorin Maazel once told me that there was no such thing as a right or a wrong tempo: If you think it’s too slow, who’s to say that it might sound better played even more slowly? I was reminded of this when I heard this version of Shostakovich’s Eighth Symphony and concluded that, like Beethoven’s Pastoral (probably the only thing both works have in common) it’s possible to have equally fine slow and fast versions. Gergiev, who seems to have abandoned the one-size- fits-all and frustratingly generalised approach which marred his Mahler cycle, takes 28 minutes for the sprawling Adagio/Allegro first movement. Mark Wigglesworth takes even longer, yet both readings are valid. By contrast, Oleg Caetani in a performance hailed by all, takes 20!

Gergiev’s Mariiinsky forces are like a giant war machine, ironically, as few symphonies have ever dramatised the horror of war more starkly. As the centrepoint of Shostakovich’s so-called War Trilogy, it stands as one of the greatest symphonic landmarks of the 20th century, in between the Scylla of the relentlessly bombastic and overlong Seventh and the Charybdis of the strangely lightweight and quirky Ninth. Playing and conducting of this stellar standard avoid having the first movement become a desolate trudge, punctuated by traumatised paroxysms, played fortissimo. The beautifully played and phrased extended cor anglais solo towards the end of the movement attempts to give “balm for the soul”, but fails.

The first scherzo has just the right element of threatening but hollow bumptiousness and the subsequent misnamed allegretto, (completely unlike the good-natured Classical Viennese jog trot) is really an even more malevolent scherzo, this time manic, featuring a blowsy but brilliantly played circus tent trumpet solo, as if to indicate a biting parody of normality.

The equally bizarrely titled largo (really a passacaglia) becomes a spectral episode (it always reminds me of the ‘atomic wasteland’ epilogue of Vaughan Williams’ Sixth Symphony, rather than the dramatic tragedy of the final movement of Brahms’ Symphony) and the second allegretto has a heart-rending flute and pizzicato strings passage sounding like breath ebbing from a dying body. Repeated attempts to lighten the atmosphere again come to nothing. There’s no consolation: the green shoots probably won’t survive. No nuance escapes Gergiev and his forces. Renditions of this excellence make the work the equal of the composer’s Fifth and Tenth symphonies.