Prokofiev, who never liked playing second fiddle to anyone, must have been piqued by Shostakovich’s Soviet celebrity. But could the great Shostakovich boom be over? With three significant Prokofiev symphony cycles under way it looks as if some judicious rebalancing is taking place. That said, even die-hard fans will admit that Prokofiev’s seven works in the form aren’t always magnificent and Marin Alsop’s elegant lucidity provides only a partial solution to the problem in this fourth release in her series. She gets unfailingly good string-playing, often more sensitively nuanced than that of her rivals, but her São Paulo team does tend to ‘normalise’ the invention, smoothing away rough edges in a manner not everyone will find idiomatic.

Typically generous in its provision of makeweights and warmly recorded (I’ve not heard the audiophile Blu ray version), the new disc kicks off with a Scythian Suite offering keen rhythmic definition and considerable depth of feeling. For ultimate interpretative heft and passion I would turn to Claudio Abbado and the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra; the conductor strains every last sinew and it helps that the band is so much larger. Still, Alsop’s reading works on its own terms, and if she makes the music sound as much like Roussel as Stravinsky one can perhaps discern why Serge Diaghilev chose to reject this would-be ballet score as insufficiently Russian.

The Third Symphony, stitched together patchwork-style from Prokofiev’s then unstaged opera The Fiery Angel, can’t perhaps be expected to convince as a conventional symphonic entity. Naxos has been here before with Theodore Kuchar’s ill-kempt Ukrainian forces and anyone brought up on them will be used to a much edgier, sadomasochistic kind of effect. Alsop provides less revelatory detail than Kirill Karabits, working with what was once ‘her’ Bournemouth orchestra yet, in further downplaying the sense of hysterical possession associated with the opera, she makes the Third seem unusually coherent. It’s good to have Prokofiev’s autumnal add-on, here rendered raptly nostalgic (those mainly Russian-trained strings again). And the price is right.