It’s not on the same epic scale as Deryck Cooke’s completion of Mahler’s Tenth Symphony or Anthony Payne’s of Elgar’s Third. But Gerard McBurney’s 1991 reconstruction (from 40 pages of piano sketches) of the orchestral score that Shostakovich wrote for a 1931 revue called Hypothetically Murdered is a classic of empathetic deduction.

McBurney takes a few chronological liberties with the 20 resuscitated numbers, but his aim was to make an effective concert suite. And as presented by a galvanised London Philharmonic under Vladimir Jurowski, effective was certainly the right word — along with blistering, exuberant and manic.

The spirit of Offenbach and Johann Strauss may infuse the frantic gallops and the self-parodying sentimentality of the slithery chromatic waltzes. Yet Shostakovich would surely have acknowledged McBurney’s brilliantly brittle orchestration — replete with clattering xylophone, rampaging brass and rattling thundersheet — as an inspired homage to his own sound-world, at least before his youthful effervescence was soured by bitter experience.

By all accounts the stage action for Hypothetically Murdered, a surreal mixture of satirical cabaret, circus, burlesque and ballet, was as raucous as the music. It must have been practically the last wild fling of avant-garde absurdism in Soviet theatre before Stalin’s henchmen battened down the hatches.

But Shostakovich continued to write fascinating theatre music, and this absorbing concert also included the Ten Songs of the Fool that he composed for Grigory Kozintsev’s 1941 production of King Lear. To call them songs is almost an exaggeration: they are the pithiest of musical epigrams, some no more than ten seconds long, that nevertheless conjure micro-universes of emotion.

With his comi-tragic face — the sort of infinitely malleable features that would give him a great alternative career in French mime — the young Russian bass Alexander Vinogradov exactly caught the sense of dark, uncomfortable truths being conveyed in cryptic metaphors. Shostakovich wasn’t only evoking Lear’s Fool, of course: he was also portraying himself.

But Vinogradov also has a world-class voice: powerful, dark and grainy in the time-honoured Slavic mould, but also flexible enough to put over three Mozart arias with compelling intensity. Quite a prospect.