"Without hesitation, I can call this a "good news, bad news" event. The good news is the musical performances by soloists, chorus and orchestra are simply superb, and much of the success must be credited to conductor Constantin Trinks, who captures the full measure of Prokofiev's powerful score with uncommonly adept phrasing and subtlety. Musically speaking this is the finest recording of the opera ever made. Now the bad news: this is a regietheater production that, while probably not disappointing to those who favor such nontraditional and aggressively modern approaches, radically recasts Prokofiev's opera from its Renaissance-era setting to, presumably, a crude mid-20th century mental asylum ... Discarding the religious elements here is akin to taking the whale out of Moby Dick and replacing it with an angry minnow ... Bo Skovhus is excellent as Ruprecht ... [and] again, on purely musical grounds, this new effort on Unitel Edition is the first choice".