A sharply trudging accented rhythm launches the first movement of the Second Symphony. This is a work from his time in Moscow at the end of his formal studies. It was not premiered until April 1915 by which time he was in action with the Russian Army. The concert was in St Petersburg with the Court Orchestra conducted by Hugo Warlich. This was quite a Miaskovsky event as the tone poem Silence was also premiered on the same programme. The music has that archetypical black swooning, acid-hailing hysteria and craggy gait so characteristic of the composer and redolent of Rachmaninov's Isle of the Dead, Tchaikovsky's Fifth Symphony and Francesca (listen to the last five minutes of the first movement) and of Mussorgsky. The Adagio serioso is hesitant, melancholic and reflective with some recall, along the way, of the big slow movement of Rachmaninov's Second Symphony. This disc has competition from Gottfried Rabl and the Vienna SO (Orfeo C 496 991 A) and a deleted Russian Revelation RV 10068 with Rozhdestvensky. Rabl is quick: 13.00, 13.44, 15.28. Rozhdestvensky: 14.05, 14.56, 15.23. Svetlanov: 13.52, 16.21, 16.41. I am not all sure about the ending of the work - rather perfunctory and abrupt - but this is an issue with the work not with Svetlanov's exegesis.

Three weeks to write in piano score and one week to orchestrate saw the Eighteenth Symphony emerge into a world racked with disappearances and show trials. Its mood is rambunctious like a boozy country fair with echoes of Balakirev's concert overtures and Mussorgsky's Neva melancholy. There is also the jauntiness of Bax's fake Slav Gopak and an ungenteel uproar that does remind you of Copland's Rodeo and Billy the Kid more often than you might think. The idyll of the long lento (longer than the other two movements put together) gives way to a return to folksy capering and the gentle musing of the silver birch trees. The work was very popular in the Soviet Union and travelled far and wide carrying its dedication to the twentieth anniversary of the October Revolution. It was even arranged for military band - a version that so impressed the composer that the Nineteenth was actually written for military band. A world away the British composer Joseph Holbrooke, during the same decade, wrote his Fifth (Wild Wales) and Sixth (Old England) Symphonies for brass band and military band respectively. Both made heavy use of national folksong.

Rob Barnett