Wagner was the appetiser and the dessert of this somewhat
indigestible meal from Valery Gergiev and the Kirov Orchestra.
Without him (Wagner, that is), it's safe to say, the rest of the
programme would never have happened. Early Schoenberg
and late Skriabin hallucinated on his legacy. Neither quite
knew where they were going but both wholeheartedly believed
that they would know when they got there. Which is much the
way I felt about great swathes of this programme.
The appetiser was promising. A new day dawning in Hans
Sachs' Nuremberg. Solo cellos in a rosy awakening, a solemn
chorale from the horns: the Prelude to Act III of Die
Meistersinger. Grateful, poetic playing. But of all Wagner's
preludes, none is more of an appetiser for what follows. Now
was the moment to hear Sachs' great soliloquy "Wahn,
Wahn! Uberall Wahn!". Instead we were taken far, far from
Nuremberg to the crepuscular forests of Maeterlinck's
imagination.
Schoenberg's fleshy tone poem Pelleas und Melisande needs
careful filleting before serving. At best, it is darkly beautiful,
oppressively atmospheric. At worst, it is a paroxysm too far.
A pea-souper. Without very careful balancing, the counterpoint
overreaches itself. Gergiev achieved that with every climax;
the febrility of his reading was quickly tiresome, in-your-face
and overwrought, Kirov-style, at every turn. A really successful
performance of this will have you wondering what makes
Pelleas and Golaud's descent into the vaults so eerily
disquieting. Here it was all too clear, too literal: trombone
glissandi.
We then had the interval to clear our heads before the next
round of paroxysms. Nobody – not even the Crouch End
Festival Chorus – changed into white robes (as suggested by
the composer) for the performance of Alexander Skriabin's
mystic bash Prometheus: The Poem of Fire. But the Albert
Hall did attempt a paltry light show in keeping with his vision
of visible harmonic colour. The man was, of course,
completely barking, as this, his other poem of ecstasy, made
perfectly clear, but Gergiev and his Promethean pianist
Alexander Toradze brought the divine fire down about our
heads with deafening aplomb and, in those welcome
quietudes suggesting the twilight's last gleaming, they also
managed a degree of transparency and repose so lacking in
the Schoenberg.
Finally, Wagner returned, in the shape of Wotan, summoning
his fire in what frankly sounded like a rehearsal of the final
scene from Die Walkure. Vladimir Vaneev – a principal
baritone of the Kirov – might at least have learnt it for the
occasion. He sounded tired, unengaged, uncommanding, and
short at the top. Boring. Which is quite an achievement with
this material. Gergiev's lustrous strings gave some heart to
the occasion but the divine fire did not descend a second
time.
