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

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

BY Rick Jones (Evening Standard)

Coloured lights have illumined a number of concerts during the current season, but only in last night's were they actually called for. Scriabin's Prometheus: The Poem of Fire has the hues specified in the score. They were timidly projected.

One senses an anxiety not to cause offence. After all, it is only a short hop from the light display to the pop concert. The anaemic lighting was not suggested by the score, which is rich and passionate. The composer woud surely have wanted us bathed in reds, purples, blues and yellows.

Valery Gergiev conducted the chameleon score with spiky, querulous hands. Alexander Toradze played the knotty piano part sometimes as if camouflaged and the Crouch End Festival Chorus, whose records sell well in the States, were the impressive optional wordless choir. Their final glorious blue Aah! met a delighted Woh! from the prommers coming the other way.

No less passionate a score is Schoenberg's tone poem Pelleas und Melisande in which green envy surges between brothers. Golden trombones rasped inside their mutes. The brown cellos swayed as one. Gergiev urged the relentless, ever-climbing, never-arriving melodrama towards its tragic fizzling out.

The Kirov Orchestra played extracts from Wagner with colourful operatic pomp to open and close the concert. The prelude to Act 3 of The Mastersingers was a curtain of sound while Wotan's Farewell and the Magic Fire Music from The Valkyries flickered untidily before baritone Vladimir Vaneev's defiant warning not to enter the hot red ring. Pah! The prommers do this every night for only £3 each.

Thanks to the Evening Standard for this review.