Norwegian orchestras have been here before…up to a point. Mariss Jansons set down two suites from Romeo and Juliet with the Oslo Philharmonic (EMI, 5/89), more than a decade before he threw in the towel, citing the acoustic problems of the band’s home base. Few would deny that Bergen’s Grieg Hall comes over better in Andrew Litton’s selection (BIS, 7/07) – three suites, suitably reordered. Looking beyond Scandinavia, if you want the 20th century’s greatest full-length ballet score complete in audio format, the field is not as competitive as might be supposed. While readers will have their own favourites from Gennady Rozhdestvensky to Vladimir Ashkenazy, there remains a gap in the market for a truly first-rate rendition in state-of-the-art sound. LAWO’s pink-themed packaging looks more contemporary than LSO Live’s for Valery Gergiev and I was expecting the former to triumph on sonic grounds as well. In the event the bass-light, aseptic sonority of Vasily Petrenko’s ensemble is not necessarily preferable to the sheer clout of the LSO in the concrete bunker that is London’s Barbican Hall.

In place of Soviet-style weight, Petrenko wields a new broom. His tempi are often too extreme for dancing, or for fencing, come to that. Sections within numbers are refreshed unpredictably, sometimes slowed, more often swift, voicings tweaked to expose long-buried lines or surprising points of colour. The music sounds less implacably Russian that it does under Gergiev, whose concentration may come and go – he lacks fire in the earlier fight scenes – but whose overall approach is nothing if not idiomatic. Petrenko refuses to overplay the emotional conflicts latent in the music. Favouring parody over pomp (for example, track 8’s ceremonial ‘Interlude’, in which Gergiev is a third slower), his ‘Young Juliet’ (track 10) really is young, bouncing from one activity to another as if suffering from attention deficit disorder.

Neither set includes the material Prokofiev discarded when revamping his original 1935 ballet, the one with the non-Shakespearean ‘happy ending’, in which the protagonists do not die but are ‘released’ as Christian Science contends ‘from the false reality of their material being’. On the plus side, Petrenko has a proper chamber organ in the ‘Balcony Scene’, where Gergiev resorts to solo strings. Elsewhere, an interpretation designed to underline the fragility of young love risks coming across as relatively inconsequential until we near the final curtain. Is this psychological insight or an unwillingness to engage?