Something a little different this week. Get your ears around the ferocious and concise drama of Nikolai Myaskovsky's Tenth Symphony, a truly remarkable document of early 20th century symphonic history in terms of its sounds, structure, energy, musical language, formal compression, and even in terms of the performers for whom it was written. But I hope this short, sharp blast of Soviet-era symphonism by an unjustly neglected composer, who contributed more to the symphonic canon in terms of sheer number of pieces than Shostakovich, Prokofiev, and Rachmaninov combined, will whet your appetite to discover more Myaskosky - not least the rest of his 27 symphonies.

Myaskovsky is the missing link in the story of the Russian symphony in the 20th century. Born in 1881, the year before Stravinsky, he's the bridge between Tchaikovsky and the modernist symphonists such as Prokofiev and Shostakovich, and was regarded as the "the musical conscience of Moscow" throughout the Soviet period by his fellow composers.

Like every other Russian creative artist, he was deeply affected by the regime, steering a course between official approbation (he won the Stalin Prize six times, and in his 12th Symphony wrote music honouring the inspiring topic of the Collectivisation of Farming) and denouncement: after the Zhdanov decree in 1948, which he called "hysterical", Myaskovsky was censured, along with Shostakovich, Khachaturian, and Prokofiev.

But Myaskovsky's example for his fellow composers and musicians in the 20s, 30s, and 40s, above all as a teacher at the Moscow Conservatory from 1921, was as a creative figure whose life was dedicated to realising a uniquely diverse vision of what the Russian symphony could be. His symphonies don't generally have an explicitly social or political function. They inhabit their own world of personal musical exploration, and veer from expressionist modernism to high-romantic lyricism, from epic grandeur – as in his 6th Symphony, the longest he wrote, arguably his most ambitious achievement, to dark, disturbing emotional intimacy, like the opening of the single-movement 13th. These pieces were enormously influential on younger generations: as Murray McLachan says in this perceptive article on Myaskovsky's music, Sviatoslav Richter, Sergei Prokofiev, and many other musical luminaries would play Myaskovsky's latest symphonies as soon as they were available in piano arrangements, to find out what the prodigious symphonist had just discovered.

Myaskovsky's 10th, composed in 1927, was premiered the following year by one of Soviet Russia's most fascinating musical institutions - Persimfans, the "The First Conductorless Symphony Ensemble", founded by Lev Tseitlin, which lasted for a decade from 1922 (and which was revived in 2008). It's a brilliant, and as far as I'm aware, unique idea - a full-size symphony orchestra that operated without a maestro, a vision of a genuinely un-hierarchical, quasi-communist music-making. But I'm not surprised that the Persimfans performance of the 10th was something of a disaster: Miaskovsky's music, cast in a single, 17-minute movement, presents huge technical challenges for its large orchestra (as you can see from the score); if you throw into the mix that the players have to get it all together without somebody on the podium coordinating the symphony's shocking changes of tempo, texture, and mood, and the sheer, violent energy of its fast music, the result must have been chaotic.

The piece has a programmatic inspiration in Pushkin's poem The Bronze Horseman and Alexander's Benois's illustrations of the story, in which a young man's betrothed is drowned in the flooding of St Petersburg of 1824; after cursing the statue of Peter the Great at the fate that befell her, the young man is then chased through the streets by the statue which has come to life and pursues him to his own watery doom in the river Neva. You'll hear the horses, the fear, and the monumentality of the story in Myaskovsky's music, but this isn't a Straussian attempt to translate a story as precisely as possible into sound. Instead, Myaskovsky takes the fatalistic implacability of the story as his starting point, and throws us right into a ferocious drama, putting you under the horse's hooves after just a few seconds of marmoreal chromaticism in the low strings, woodwind, and brass, as if the statue has already started to chase us.

Myaskovsky's harmonic language is a uniquely distinctive amalgam of late-romantic density with expressionist acerbity - which music-jargonese is better experienced in the actual sounds of the symphony. The furious opening is contrasted with brief sections of slower lyrical uneasiness, a melody that starts in the oboe, and which you can hear as symbolising the man's grief, or his beloved's watery demise. But the "Allegro tumultuoso" - which really is tumultuous - soon returns, and it develops with snarling intensity, and as well as its rhythmic sound and fury, it creates a harmonic pincer movement with musical lines that converge from the very top and bottom of the orchestra, a realisation of a musical vice, like the fate that ensnares the hero of Pushkin's story.

Myaskovsky ramps up the tension even further in a chaotically fast and chromatically wild fugue, the music chasing its own tail, faster and faster, before the marmoreal music we heard right at the start is unveiled in its true, terrifying guise. There's a memory of the haunted lyricism of the slower tune before the Allegro advances on us again. The victim's demise is consummated in music of massive, loud intensity and then of eerie, spectral nostalgia, before the symphony's final gestures of orchestral onslaught, made all the more frightening with the silences that Myaskovsky composes around his gigantic blocks of brass sound and guillotine-like chords.

Myaskovsky himself wrote to Prokofiev that the symphony was "as massive as if it were made of iron". The brilliance of the piece is to compress that iron until it's white-hot with blazing musical imagination. (And Myaskovsky had good personal reasons to find this musical ferocity, this simultaneous scream against inevitable fate and stat(u)e-based violence: his father had been murdered in 1921 by Red Army zealots for wearing Tsarist insignia.) It's no surprise it's one of composer Oliver Knussen's favourites to conduct: there's a lot to be inspired by in Myaskovsky's Tenth – and a lot to discover in the other 26, too!

Key recording

There are a handful of other recordings, but Evgeny Svetlanov's with the Russian State Symphony Orchestra is the most compressed, and the most violently, compellingly realised.