The Romeo excerpts and the ''Royal Hunt and Storm'' have been recorded so often that any new versions are going to have their work cut out making a claim on listeners' interest. These are clean, efficient and well-disciplined – faint-praise adjectives. Beyond that, it has to be said that the performances are dull. The rhythms are inert, starting to life only in the middle section of the ''Royal Hunt'': for most of the time there is a sense of the mechanical, even in what should be the exhilaration of the ''Capulet's ball''. The phrasing is too often predictable, so that the passionate outpourings of the ''Love scene'' come to seem tame statements. Everything is very safe, and the missing element of danger loses too much from Berlioz's exciting ideas. The chorus are rather too distantly placed, making for incoherence. Unusually, the fill-up is the Prelude which Berlioz wrote in 1863 when he was obliged to divide Les Troyens into two parts. It is a short ceremonial piece of no great distinction, based on Cassandra's duet with Chorebus in Act 1, and in the opera paving the way for a bard who tells the story so far.'