As my recent Collection (3/22) demonstrated, we’re not exactly short of recordings of Respighi’s Pines of Rome. Most of them are paired with the equally popular Fountains but a few – such as the excellent Minnesota Orchestra recording under Eiji Oue that I cited in my survey – break free and harness it to non-Roman Trilogy works. One of the other works Oue programmed was the suite from Respighi’s ballet Belkis, Queen of Sheba, who also slips on her ballet slippers here on this new album from Linn.

Milanese conductor Alessandro Crudele, currently based in Berlin, is at the helm of the London Philharmonic Orchestra. He’s never conducted them before and there’s little to suggest that sparks flew in these recording sessions. Pines, which opens the programme, is given a tidy reading. The children playing in the Villa Borghese are rather well behaved, but the strings play expressively in the Catacombs and principal clarinet Benjamin Mellefont shapes his solo lines poetically on the moonlit Janiculum hill. Crudele leads a purposeful march along the Appian Way.

Having listened to so many spectacularly engineered Pines, I was very surprised by Linn’s disappointing effort here. It’s bass-heavy, which is fine, but when you compare it to Oue, Antonio Pappano and the Santa Cecilia Orchestra or John Wilson’s recent recording with the Sinfonia of London, the sound is cloudier, losing a lot of the surface glitter in the upper strings and percussion. It’s as if your speakers are clogged. Balances are odd: the brass feel too recessed to make the necessary impact in the closing moments, yet the offstage solo trumpet in ‘Catacombs’ – marked in the score as il più lontano possibile (‘as far away as possible’) – doesn’t sound offstage at all. By contrast, the nightingale should be asking serious questions of its agent, as it barely registers.

Considering such a competitive field for Pines, it’s little wonder that the two couplings here fare better. Brazilian Impressions is given a persuasive reading, the slithering clarinets and bassoon eliciting a shudder in the central movement, which depicts the collection of venomous snakes Respighi encountered on a visit to the Instituto Butantan in São Paulo.

It’s always good to hear the score to Belkis. Nigel Simeone is right to call it ‘a hidden gem in Respighi’s output’ in his fine booklet note. Crudele and the LPO are sinuous in ‘The Dance of Belkis at Dawn’ but their ‘War Dance’ and ‘Orgiastic Dance’ aren’t exactly unbuttoned. Oue and the Minnesotans have much more fun here, while Sascha Goetzel and the Borusan Istanbul Philharmonic Orchestra are positively exhibitionist, in bold, punchy sound. If only the LPO had let its collective hair down as wildly …