Crouch End Festival Chorus
Kirov Orchestra conducted by Valery Gergiev
Royal Albert Hall (Prom 50)
28 August 2001

Wagner - Die Meistersinger (extract)
Schoenberg - Pelleas und Melisande
Skryabin - Prometheus: The Poem of Fire (this is the part we sang in!)
Wagner - Die Walkure (extract)

BY Geoffrey Norris (Daily Telegraph)

AS if downhearted by the drubbing its opera company received during its recent London season, the Kirov Orchestra, under Valery Gergiev, was very much below par in Tuesday night's Prom. There were intermittent signs of the proud, persuasive playing and polish that have earned the orchestra its distinguished reputation, but there were rather more hints that the performances had not been sufficiently prepared. However much rehearsal time they had received, they could have done with more, not necessarily in terms of coordination or alertness, but rather in relation to interpretative scope, subtlety and sheer creative spark.

There was an operatic slant to the outer extremities of the programme, with the prelude to Act 3 of Wagner's Die Meistersinger to start with, and, at the end, Wotan's Farewell and the Magic Fire Music from Die Walkure. In neither of these excerpts, however, did the music really take off. It was safely played, and the Wotan monologue was competently sung by the baritone Vladimir Vaneev, but the playing sounded studied rather than driven by dramatic exigencies. The encore of The Ride of the Valkyries sought to whip up excitement, but only really succeeded in capping a concert that had gone for easy options.

This was particularly true of the main work in the concert's first half, Schoenberg's substantial symphonic poem Pelleas und Melisande. On the face of it, this score, written in a plump, ripe, late Romantic language, ought to have suited the timbre of the Kirov Orchestra ideally, and it is true that, in actual richness of sonority, all the ingredients were in place. But the performance did little to leaven the patches of glutinous excess in Schoenberg's orchestration, nor to create a full context for the music's passionate impulse.

More surprising still was the way in which Skryabin's last orchestral work, Prometheus: The Poem of Fire, remained so resolutely earthbound. The Kirov has made a marvellously fevered recording of this music, but here the sheer volume of the ending did not compensate for the performance's stifled volatility and emasculated ecstasy.

So you didn't like it then? Thanks to the Daily Telegraph for this review.