The excerpts from Spactacus and Gayenah conducted by the composer himself with the London Symphony in its palmy days not long before his death, bring these two scores with their heady exoticism to life. The Concertos are a different story.

Neither has ever become mainstream repertoire, despite the advocacy of the seriously underrated pianist Mindrew Katz and the peerless David Oistrakh in the Violin Concerto, in which he apparently had serious input. In the Piano Concerto, Katz invests this often racketty score (replete with phoney orientalisms) with genuine poetry, and the lyrical episodes are well handled by Boult in acceptable 1950s sound.

Where the work momentarily comes unstuck is in the disastrous inclusion of the flexatone, a kind of musical saw, wisely omitted from Willaim Kapell’s recording. Unlike the theramin in Miklos Rosza’s score to Hitchcock’s Spellbound, where it adds to the sinister ambience, the flexatone sounds like a demented audience member whistling along. The Violin Concerto benefits similarly from Oistrakh’s virtuosity and imagination.

For me, the most interesting work in the set is the Suite from the 1942 ballet Masquarade, based on Lermontov’s reworking of the Othello story, where Khachaturian’s sardonic portrait of Leningrad society could almost have been penned by Shostakovich.