This last of Vasily Petrenko’s discs as chief conductor of the Oslo Philharmonic finds the team on something like top form. Perhaps the players cannot muster the authentic heft of the State Academic Symphony Orchestra of Russia (‘Evgeny Svetlanov’) where Petrenko now succeeds Vladimir Jurowski as artistic director, British commitments notwithstanding. Then again, the younger conductor has a way of turning that leaner Scandi sonority to his advantage in Soviet repertoire, validating Prokofiev’s sometimes peculiar orchestral doubling with his own fanatical clarity of focus. Galina Vishnevskaya wrote of the Sixth’s sound world as ‘sharp and ringing, like the dripping of snow in spring’. Few save Yevgeny Mravinsky and the Leningrad Philharmonic in a mercurial, much-bootlegged 1967 account (Praga et al) make complete sense of it.

One never knows quite what to expect from Petrenko’s new broom. His previous pairing of Prokofiev’s Fifth and Myaskovsky’s 21st (1/21) gave space to the former while keeping Myaskovsky on the move. This time Prokofiev’s stark opening gesture is faster than usual, the first movement’s formally elusive parade of material kept quite cool and straight – without rubato in the chant-like second theme (oboes in octaves) – so that the ratcheting up of tension, when it comes, is genuinely disturbing. Especially vivid is the painful wheezing of the horns over irregular low pizzicato heartbeats, surely a reference to Prokofiev’s own hypertensive episodes. Broadly speaking, the Largo’s trajectory is from vinegarish dissonance to awkward tenderness and back, yet I was struck afresh by the poignancy of its closing bars. The return of the fairy-tale celesta from its central episode can pass almost unnoticed. Not so here, with every dot and comma so exquisitely placed. The finale might be among the deftest on disc but those frolicking strings are flirting with hysteria. Where Mravinsky, Neeme Järvi, Vladimir Ashkenazy and Valery Gergiev transform the movement’s pay-off gesture into an agonised slow-motion grimace, Petrenko rushes us over the edge. Andrew Litton does something similar in Bergen although his reading feels less provocative, the sonorities safer, shinier (BIS, 6/13).

Litton’s all-Prokofiev programme is part of a complete symphony cycle. Petrenko’s is not and sceptical listeners may even resist investigating the coupling given Myaskovsky’s disavowal of 20th-century expressive means by this stage of his career. In the 27th as elsewhere, the foursquare academic carapace matters less than the quality of the lyrical ideas concealed within. In time I’ll wager that many passages will come to seem affecting and personal. Need it matter that the ghosts of Dvořák, Glazunov, Rachmaninov and the rest are never entirely dispelled? The terminally ill composer returns to the key centre of his Cello Concerto and makes the same kind of plaintive appeal. Warmth as well as poise is called for and at the very least Petrenko’s unforced pacing ensures that the ear has time to appreciate the sensitive shaping of string lines and woodwind solos.

The sound is a little drab but it’s LAWO’s booklet that may divide opinion. Designer-led, the vaguely suprematist artwork is a plus, less so the narrow columns of Norwegian and English text in minuscule, colour-coordinated print. Strongly recommended even so.