Marin Alsop adds to the recent spate of Sixths with a curiously low-voltage performance. Her overall timings suggest that she sees the piece more classically than most, taking the first movement at a lick sufficient to give the symphony an essentially traditional fast-slower-fastest trajectory. However remote from Valery Gergiev’s brooding menace or Evgeny Mravinsky’s jittery, unstable conception, there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with Alsop’s choice of something like a single tempo for the elusive first-movement exposition – except that I don’t hear much symphonic thrust. Her reading is never less than fluent but at 11'24" something odd happens, perhaps a misread accidental. This creates a strange lurch in the line. The slow movement is again somewhat subdued, with a renewed suggestion that all is not well with the printed material around the eight minute mark.

The finale responds best to lightweight treatment, at least initially. Here the music-making is spick and span as well as brisk, engaging enough even with sound that’s not quite state-of-the-art. There are full booklet-notes by Richard Whitehouse, who describes the denouement in apocalyptic terms not borne out by the rendering itself. Like James Gaffigan, Alsop interprets the final flourish breezily. Conductors more familiar with Soviet Russian practice and the context in which Prokofiev composed usually go for a catastrophic slow-motion grimace. Perhaps the Americans feel that too obvious a gesture. Neither Mravinsky, up-close and dangerous in 1967, nor the recent, surprisingly reflective Gergiev can be accused of compliance with the a tempo injunction in the score.

Alsop and her players seem more at ease in the hybrid Waltz Suite, from which three numbers served as Neeme Järvi’s makeweight on the original single-disc issue of his own well-regarded Sixth in the 1980s. Alsop has more émigré Russian string players in São Paulo than Järvi had at his disposal in Glasgow, yet it’s the vintage Chandos sound team who conjure the more plausible soundscape in the main work. Galina Vishnevskaya wrote that this music should sound ‘sharp and ringing, like the dripping of snow in spring’. On Naxos I’m afraid it doesn’t.