The Fourth Symphony, completed in 1936 but withheld by the composer until 1961, can be a shattering work, the most original and forward-looking of all Shostakovich's symphonies. After the high standards of Vasily Petrenko's cycle for Naxos so far, you might have expected something special in this vast work, but in the end the performance slightly disappoints. It's still very fine – the Liverpool players get around the enormous technical challenges with great verve, and the self-destructive climaxes are never shirked. But there's a brittleness to how Petrenko treats some of the episodes, especially in the first movement, that seems to undervalue their intensity, and makes something flippant out of music that surely ought to be savagely sardonic. Much of his reading, though, is spot-on – the hard-to-read second movement is judged perfectly – and he doesn't get much wrong in the increasingly bleak journey through the finale, either.