Marin Alsop’s Prokofiev cycle has had its ups and downs. A particular highlight was the generous coupling of the 1947 edition of the Fourth Symphony with The Prodigal Son, the ballet project from which it effectively derives (Naxos, 11/13). There was also a certain logic about pairing the wartime Fifth (in a lyrical reading not everyone liked as much as I did) with the rarely heard symphonic suite The Year 1941 (Naxos, 8/12). Sadly the present issue offers relatively short measure and is not so imaginatively planned.

On the plus side, the conductor does have her own ideas about the Seventh, keeping its first movement on a tighter rein than those recent recordings that seek to make the music bigger or more explicitly Russian, Valery Gergiev’s being the broadest of all. Alsop and her production team engineer an interesting focus on countermelodies – the effect is otherwise pleasantly recessed rather than immediate – but there’s less in the way of glamour or romance. The Scherzo again feels undercharacterised, at least until a positively supersonic (and dangerously unstable) dash to the finishing line. The slow movement is low-key. The finale, by contrast, risks several pronounced changes of gear, its genial march-like episode almost funereal. That the music’s ultimate winding down feels laboured, seeming to miss the innocence of the writing, is probably deliberate. Alsop goes on to include the final flourish we know Prokofiev added unwillingly at a late stage to please the authorities and secure much-needed funds. While her rivals mostly discard this appendage, Naxos would appear to have missed a trick in not providing both versions separately tracked.

Bringing down the curtain with the ubiquitous Kijé suite was possibly unwise too, however delicate and ungimmicky the performance. And why the random lollipops from The Love for Three Oranges? Sampling, say, Winter Bonfire (1950) would have been stylistically and chronologically appropriate as well as usefully gap-filling. In the main work Alsop is always musical but you may crave a fuller, more assertive take on the composer.