As I write, Riccardo Muti and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra are embarking on their fifth European tour. Their relationship has been a huge success, the maestro’s fashionable outreach activity and old-style charisma neatly squaring a difficult circle. All that’s missing is the kind of recorded legacy that Fritz Reiner and Sir Georg Solti could take for granted in what now seems a golden era. The CSO once promised to launch its own record label with Scriabin’s Poem of Ecstasy and Prokofiev’s Third Symphony. Neither materialised but Romeo and Juliet is a Muti staple too. The conductor has slightly cut his favoured selection of pieces from the first two suites, rejigging them into a sequence which follows Shakespeare’s plot. No doubt the arrangement works in concert. On disc and online the competition is intense. Given that you can invest in more generous single-disc selections from the likes of Claudio Abbado’s Berlin Philharmonic or plump for the complete ballet score under Rozhdestvensky, Previn, Maazel, Ozawa and Gergiev, is there a strong enough case for Muti’s 49 minutes?

I’d say there is, not least because Muti’s Chicagoans have some of the qualities once associated with Karajan’s Berliners. Orchestral tuttis are not merely weighty but ultra-sophisticated and David Frost’s sound team preserves their velvet sonority with a lustre rarely obtained, as here, from edited concert material. There’s plenty of fine solo playing and not just from the famously demonstrative brass: former Principal Flute Mathieu Dufour (now in Berlin) is on particularly eloquent form. Less happily, the performance feels rather slow, preoccupied with Prokofiev’s textural subtleties, whether delicate or deep-pile, at the expense of the narrative arc. Thus the ‘Death of Tybalt’ is never quite propulsive or violent enough. Once the strings have whirled him to destruction, a certain nonchalance sets in with the 15 hammered chords and a none-too-solemn funeral procession. As for the unprecedentedly ripe and rich climax of ‘Romeo and Juliet before parting’, Muti appears to have forgotten that this is an adolescent romance. Still, what follows is suitably ominous, the music winding down with a beautifully articulated, spooky deliberation. In ‘Romeo at Juliet’s tomb’ we have again the kind of execution which proclaims the CSO as the world’s best or something like it. Recommended, even if Muti is occasionally heavy-handed. The concluding applause, which must surely have been vociferous, has been removed and a nicely illustrated booklet gives the lowdown on Prokofiev’s visits to Chicago and his conviction that in Romeo and Juliet’s frank melodicism he had found the true music of the future.