The release of super-budget-price recordings of musicals is rare enough to warrant a welcome. This one of West Side Story, not from Broadway but from America’s country music heartland, is preferable to the last budget-price entry with Barbara Bonney and Michael Ball on IMG, but it doesn’t challenge the immediacy and freshness of the original Broadway cast album from 1957.

Of course, it’s a rather unfair comparison. A first recording almost invariably possesses a sense of newness, of discovery, that subsequent ones, particularly of such familiar music, are invariably disadvantaged by. The challenge to that original recording from this newcomer is Mike Eldred, who as the estranged gang member of the Jets, Tony, more than makes his mark. Despite being recorded close to the microphone, his voice has a lovely quality that shines through in his sensitive and moving singing of ‘Maria’. Betsi Morrison, his Maria, despite an accent I can’t vouch for, begins well in the ‘Tonight’ duet; their preceding exchanges in the Balcony Scene are both natural and effectively produced.

She’s good, too, in ‘I feel pretty’ where the formal tempo suits the song and where the playing of the orchestra is suitably refined. In her other duet with Tony, ‘One hand, one heart’, a maudlin melody that’s difficult to bring off, there are signs of vocal insecurity that might have been eased by a conductor who moved the tempo on.

The musical direction is where, I fear, this new recording founders. The score is too often indulged, the adrenalin lost. As Riff, the leader of the Jets, Robert Dean notches the temperature up with ‘Jet Song’, but Marianne Cook as Anita too often lets her dramatic instincts run away at the expense of her vocal line in ‘A boy like that’. The young vocal ensemble contribute plenty of energy, if making somewhat heavy weather of ‘Gee, Officer Krupke’.

If, like me, you’ve never been convinced by Bernstein’s own DG recording of his score, and have no wish to pay out for the two-CD set on TER Classics, then look no further than the Sony original.