On the press notice of the new Leonard Slatkin recording of Rachmaninov's First Symphony, the record company (Naxos) paraphrases the early fate of the work and declares that, since reconstruction of the score in 1945, it has "taken its rightful place as one of the great Russian symphonic works of the late 19th century".

Has it? Is it a great symphonic work? I stand second in line to no-one in my love of the Second Symphony and the Symphonic Dances, to say nothing of those great piano concertos and the Rach-Pag Variations. But I run hot and cold (or, more precisely, warm and cool) about the First Symphony. My gut feeling is that there's an effective symphony of sorts in there, waiting to be released, but it needs a buccaneering conductor, an inspirational Jarvi-type swashbuckler to let it off the leash.

I'm aware of the analysis of the piece by Rachmaninov's biographer Max Harrison, and his missionary work in championing the symphony. But to my ears and mind it's an uneven work which lurches about a bit, doesn't quite hang together, is stuffed with Rachmaninov fingerprints, including that Dies Irae motto which characterises so much of his music; but all these elements haven't quite yet fully cohered into a language of completely unforced fluidity, as well as one of total integrity. That was to come, but not before the catastrophic birth of the First Symphony.

With a lot of compositions already under his belt, Rachmaninov in his early twenties was beginning to think of a symphony, a major creative leap for any composer. But whereas he had experienced no particular block with other musical forms, the First Symphony was a different bag of nails. He reported that, even with seven hours a day devoted to the writing, he was finding it heavy going. He upped his input to 10 hours a day and got the thing written.

Then he ran into problems trying to get a first performance organised. It was to be given in St Petersburg, not Rachmaninov's Moscow, and that was a political minefield. Further, the performance was to be conducted by fellow composer Glazunov, who was allegedly indifferent to the music, incredibly lazy and unorganised in his preparations, and, not for the first time, possibly drunk at the first performance, where his tempi, fundamentally unstable, got slower and slower. Reportedly a shambles, it left the young composer shattered and humiliated.

The shell-shocked Rachmaninov fled St Petersburg for Moscow as soon as he could. He gathered up the score of his symphony and left the city to lick his wounds and consider his lot. However traumatised he might have been by the experience, it wasn't terminal; he was soon making sketches for a second symphony, though he did comment on one of the sketches that he didn't imagine anyone would be interested.

As for that First Smphony, Rachmaninov seems to have considered the possibility of revising it. But he never did. The score remained in his Moscow apartment, and at some point in his country's turbulent 20th-century history, disappeared and remains lost. And that would have been the end of the saga, but for the fact that Rachmaninov, in his haste to get out of St Petersburg after the premiere, took the score but critically failed to gather up the orchestral parts from the music stands. They were filed in an archive in St Petersburg, found by chance in 1945, and, with a new score reconstructed from the original parts, relaunched with a second performance in 1945, initiating a second coming for the First Symphony and a debate which continues to this day.