The opening movement of Shostakovich’s Symphony No 11 is one of his eeriest. It paints a musical portrait of St Petersburg’s Palace Square in the run-up to the “Bloody Sunday” massacre of peaceful protesters by tsarist troops in January 1905. The subsequent three movements evoke the massacre, its aftermath and the impending turmoil of revolution.

You would think a conductor born a mere 32 years ago would have little understanding of the music’s context or meaning, but Vasily Petrenko is no ordinary conductor. A native of St Petersburg, he has known Palace Square since childhood and says that in winter “it’s easy to imagine how it looked in 1905”. He has talked to people who remember the composer (who died a year before Petrenko was born) and, as a budding student in his home city, he won the Shostakovich choral conductors’ competition – directing the composer’s arrangements of revolutionary choruses, the music that forms the thematic basis of his Eleventh Symphony.

So we shouldn’t be surprised to find Petrenko delivering such a highly charged account of the symphony in his new recording for Naxos – the first in a projected Shostakovich cycle with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, of which Petrenko is principal conductor.

As on their recent CD of Tchaikovsky’s Manfred symphony, the Liverpudlians could easily be mistaken for a crack Russian orchestra – weighty sonority in the long string melodies, brilliant articulation, blazing brass. But the key ingredient is the commitment of the playing, the sense of an orchestra at its peak.

Since Petrenko’s arrival three years ago, Liverpool has hardly been able to believe its luck. He is not just another podium pin-up trading on energy, technical facility and communication skills. He has those qualities in abundance but, more importantly, he came with an extensive repertoire (all learned out of the limelight) and an unusually mature grasp of music.

The RLPO, previously suffering from poor morale and declining audiences, has been transformed. Petrenko’s concerts regularly sell out in advance and critics struggle to find sufficient superlatives. In terms of projecting the orchestra’s work to a younger public, his tall blonde profile has been a godsend – crucially so throughout last year’s European City of Culture programme, the success of which persuaded Liverpool’s council to maintain the orchestra’s subsidy at the special 2008 level.

An extension to Petrenko’s contract beyond 2012 seems likely. His four-year-old son already speaks Scouse, the Liverpool dialect, and the city has given him a secure base from which to develop his career, with engagements next year at Glyndebourne (Macbeth) and the Paris Opera. London’s orchestras are starting take notice, and this summer Petrenko will conduct the National Youth Orchestra at the Proms.

He seems in no hurry for the next job. Liverpool is lining up a Mahler cycle for him (2010 marks the 150th anniversary of the composer’s birth, 2011 the 100th of his death), and his RLPO recording plans extend beyond Shostakovich to Rachmaninov and Elgar.

Elgar? Really? Elgar’s music is still a foreign language to many non-British conductors. But if you were lucky enough to hear Petrenko conducting the Second Symphony, as I did two years ago, you will know he understands the idiom perfectly.

Such command of large-scale symphonic structure is rare among younger-generation conductors. But give Petrenko a new piece by Kenneth Hesketh, the RLPO’s resident composer, and he’ll make the same musical sense of it as he does of Handel’s Messiah or John Tavener’s Requiem, both of which he conducted last year in Liverpool. Works as diverse as Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis, Penderecki’s St Luke’s Passion and Walton’s First Symphony now top his wish-list.

“The whole of life will not be enough to play the pieces I’d like to play,” he enthuses after a three-hour rehearsal of Respighi’s sparkling Rossiniana, during which he has worked with admirable thoroughness, but not a whiff of pedantry.

“The only place that exists for me is the very best. Second-best is a loser. That’s what I aim to achieve every time, because with this orchestra I see no ceiling. Even when we’ve had a huge success and I’m walking off the platform, I’m already starting to analyse what I can improve in myself and in the orchestra. Some of the musicians are distressed by that, especially if we’ve played fantastically. But it’s like Faust. The moment you say ‘I’m content’, that’s the moment Mephisto steals your soul.”

The improvements he is striving for are those of a born orchestra trainer, working on a distinctive sound for each style of music being played. In Mozart it means “clear string articulation, attention to dynamic changes, accuracy, how much vibrato to use”.

In Tchaikovsky it’s a question of “keeping the pressure on long notes, using the full bow [on the strings] most of the time, then in certain moments dropping it completely and playing in the [lighter] Viennese style.”

So it’s merely a matter of technique? No, says Petrenko. Understanding the composer’s mindset is just as important. “Tchaikovsky has been repeated 100,000 times. Why do it again? We need to do something unique. If you tell the story of the music during rehearsals, it changes the way the orchestra plays much more than talking about technical aspects. It galvanises them, makes them play as one. In Manfred it’s important to know how strongly Tchaikovsky identified with Byron’s hero. He was dismissed by the world much as Manfred was; he had the same fairytale imagination, the same notion of “the only love”. That’s why the music is so personal.”

And Shostakovich? Petrenko summarises the 15 symphonies as “20th-century Bach – the music expresses large-scale feelings. It happens very often in Shostakovich’s music that you have long stretches that are very silent, and it’s important to keep the emotional intensity. When the emotion starts to accelerate, you have to be able to play crescendo for 15 minutes. That’s not easy.”

As for the music’s meaning, a hot topic for anyone interested in Shostakovich interpretation, Petrenko says it’s dangerous to overload the political dimension, “because his symphonies are as much a history of his personal life as of his country. If you know that while composing the Fifth Symphony Shostakovich was secretly in love with a woman who had moved to Spain and married a man called Roman Carmen, you realise why he incorporated the Habanera [from Bizet’s Carmen] in the first movement.”

He adds: “Similarly, if you know that the published score misprints the original tempo for the finale, you realise that, at the correct speed, this music is far from triumphant. It’s cruel – an indictment not just of what was happening [under Stalin] but also of the citizens who kept silent for fear of the regime. You don’t have to know this, but it gives you a deeper understanding.”

Vasily Petrenko’s new RLPO recording of Shostakovich’s Symphony No 11 ‘The Year 1905’ is on Naxos. He conducts the same composer’s Eighth Symphony at Philharmonic Hall, Liverpool, on March 26, www.liverpoolphil.com