The novelty on this nicely if unspectacularly recorded album is the set of ‘three short dances’ for orchestra All These Lighted Things, composed in 2017 for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra by Elizabeth Ogonek (b1989). Its premiere, conducted that year by Muti, divided critics, some praising this ‘attractive piece that went down easily’ and which ‘deserves many hearings’; a dissenting view categorised it as ‘a relentless barrage of edgy musical effects in a fruitless search for an underlying purpose’. That last is unkind and manifestly wide of the mark; Ogonek may be possessed of a still-developing orchestral imagination but on the evidence of this vivacious, diverting score it is developing in the right direction.

When Prokofiev wrote his ballet Romeo and Juliet in 1935 (his first large-scale work on his return to Soviet Russia), his orchestral imagination was beyond well established. It is a shame that conductor Elim Chan felt unable to trust the composer sufficiently to record one of his suites of extracts (made from the 1935 version, not the revised 1940 rewrite used for the delayed premiere) entire, rather than yet another unoriginal sequence of eight highlights culled from the First and Second Suites, starting with ‘Montagues and Capulets’ but placing ‘The Death of Tybalt’ as item six, rather than as the finale often heard in concert.

The trouble here is that despite some delightful playing from the Antwerp Symphony Orchestra – in ‘The Young Juliet’, for instance, or the lyrical ‘Romeo and Juliet’ (Suite No 1, No 6) – the performances overall lack character and drive. Comparisons with, to pluck rivals at random, Neeme Järvi’s far more vibrant readings listed below, or Jansons in Oslo (available as a download from Warner, or on YouTube) emphasise this newcomer’s shortcomings; likewise Litton, who divided the three suites to follow the sequence of the larger whole. Chan is more successful with the Second Daphnis Suite, which is nicely done, but those who already have, say, John Wilson’s recording of the whole ballet (Chandos, 11/23) need not trouble themselves here.