The ‘Real’ in Prokofiev’s title is a pun. Aviator Alexei Maresyev really did crash behind enemy lines, then crawl for 18 days before being rescued, learn to walk, run and dance again, and take part in the Battle of Kursk. At least he did all that according to journalist Boris Polevoy, from whose Stalin-prize-winning novel Prokofiev and his partner Mira Mendelson fashioned their libretto. As the opera’s conclusion affirms, those exploits also make Alexei a ‘real man’ in the sense of moral exemplar (the Russian chelovek is less gender-specific than ‘man’; but ‘Story of a Real Person/Human Being’ would have less of a ring to it).

It’s hard to imagine Prokofiev not cringing before the Boy’s Own-style details of Polevoy’s narrative, and the subject matter does now seem extraordinarily risky (imagine a British opera on the story of Douglas Bader). It takes a huge leap back to get past the decades of satirical debunking from Beyond the Fringe onwards in order to take the opera seriously.

Yet there is enough high-grade Prokofiev in the score to make it worth the effort. Apart from which there is intense sociological interest in the opera’s fate. Like Semyon Kotko and War and Peace, Story of a Real Man fell foul of the mixture of craven-spiritedness, muddled-headedness, philistinism and vindictiveness that bedevilled Soviet cultural politics in the 1940s. It is testament to Prokofiev’s determination – some might say to his naivety – that he was still trying to find the formula for success. His ill-starred operatic career was truly a Story of a Real Composer, but one without a happy outcome.

In the event this last opera was not staged until 1960, seven years after his death, and it is on the basis of the original Bolshoi production that the only recording to date was made. There are numerous small internal cuts and a few larger ones involving minor characters, including a subplot concerning two lovers who act as a foil to Alexei and his fiancée Olga. Both the bright and breezy overture (based on the March in B flat Prokofiev composed in 1944) and the rather feeble concluding number (where a starry-eyed journalist asks Alexei to tell his story) are here replaced by more conventionally uplifting music, taken from the third entr’acte in Act 1.

The then-young Mark Ermler, who died earlier this year, conducts a commendably full-blooded account. The most impressive voices are to be heard in the hospital scenes of Act 2, and Yevgeny Kibkalo makes a stirring, if somewhat undifferentiated impression as Alexei. There is a good deal of squeaking and squalling in the female roles, above all from Glafira Deomidova as Olga.

For these reasons anyone looking for a single version of the opera would be wise to await the release of Gergiev’s brand-new Mariinsky version (presumably timed for the 50th anniversary of Prokofiev’s death next year). Even so, for all its compromises and faults, the 1961 Soviet account is a valuable historical document. Bravo to Chandos for giving it to us complete with Cyrillic text, translation and indications of the main cuts, and in very acceptable sound quality.