A Proms visit by the Kirov Orchestra and their conductor Valery
Gergiev is less of a novelty now than it was even a few years
ago. The orchestra has become a regular winter visitor to
London and was in residence at the Royal Opera House with its
parent opera and ballet troupes just last month.
Perhaps that familiarity accounted for the poor attendance at
Tuesday's programme of Wagner, Schoenberg and Scriabin -
the Albert Hall was only just half full. Or maybe it was the
fall-out from the Kirov's less than overwhelming performances at
Covent Garden, though the orchestra was the one element of the
company that emerged from that disappointment with its
reputation more or less intact.
This appearance will not have done much to restore the
company's reputation, however. It was in all respects a pretty
ordinary affair, and sounded hastily prepared. Schoenberg's
symphonic poem Pelleas und Melisande promised most: it is
the kind of late-Romantic effusion that Gergiev can respond to
urgently, but here he made it seem congested and hectic rather
than expansive and luxuriant.
Schoenberg's pupil Alban Berg made a convincing analysis of
the work as a one-movement symphony. Gergiev's
interpretation, however, was doggedly episodic and not
structurally coherent, sprawling in a way that the best
performances are not.
But Pelleas seemed lucid alongside the indulgences of
Scriabin's Prometheus. This performance came complete with a
computerised light show and the wordless ululations of the
Crouch End Festival Chorus. With Alexander Toradze as a
splashy rather than incisive piano soloist it never attained the
intensity that the music needs if it is not to seem vacuous and
absurd.
The Wagner that topped and tailed the concert was more
convincing: a hushed, warm account of the prelude to the third
act of Die Meistersinger, and an expansive evocation of Wotan's
Farewell and Magic Fire Music from the last scene of Die
Walküre.
Gergiev is halfway through a troubled Ring cycle in St
Petersburg with the Kirov, a production that already seems to
have had more directors than it has Valkyries; his stage Wotan,
the baritone Vladimir Vaneev, sang the extract here.
His performance was solid and secure rather than inspiring. How
he would manage the Farewell on stage, after he had already
argued with Fricka, laid down the law to Brünnhilde and been
grumpy for three hours, is a different matter.
