Tilson Thomas's version scores heavily with its casting of the appealingly youthful-sounding Cheyenne Jackson as Tony and Alexandra Silber as Maria...The orchestra swings like the biggest of big bands, with a driving kit drummer and some spectacular trumpet playing...The performance deserves, and demands, tumultuous applause.

So much of what Michael Tilson Thomas and his San Francisco Symphony Orchestra achieve here hits the spot; nowhere is casting wrong-headed...[Jackson] is idiomatic and engaged...Silber is lovely, too, with more vocal colour than the average show (soubrette) soprano...pretty damn good, and the first serious challenger to the...Broadway original.

As Maria, Silber accounts for several highlights on this recording. Her gleaming, peach-pure soprano lends sweetness and sexiness to the romantic duets...Tilson Thomas and the orchestra bring a wonderful clarity and pulsing sense of lushness to these songs and scenes...The percussion section covers itself in glory, punching up rhythms and deftly spicing things up throughout.

This San Francisco take on Manhattan is far slicker and more urbane than Bernstein’s own...I love the organised chaos which Tilson Thomas’s exaggerated cross-rhythms...The young lovers here are a far more believable pair than Bernstein’s operatic veterans.

Even with the dialogue cut to a bare minimum they make the drama genuinely involving – there's no hint of parody in the Puerto Rican accents...while Cheyenne Jackson's Tony is a nicely conflicted mix of sentiment and swagger. Both the choral singing and the orchestral playing are immaculate, too, but the performance doesn't always fizz as it ought to.

Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony spin over the jazzy Latin syncopations of the dance music...[Silber and Jackson] embody all the ardour of Maria and Tony’s young love without grandstanding pomposity...The SF Symphony Chorus kicks up a storm. This is a recording that will blow your socks off.

Probably the most complete version of Bernstein’s masterpiece ever recorded...It’s beautiful, but some of the edginess and energy has gone.

Listen as the fingers snap and the saxophone smoulders in the Act I prologue. You definitely feel the adrenaline of a live occasion: the vitality of the playing is enthralling. At the same time there’s a bloom and finesse about the sounds that lift us some distance from the show’s Broadway origins.