Bleeding chunks, pieces of Wagner ripped largely from the solid
flesh of the Ring and served up as a Wagner Night, were a
regular mainstay of the Proms until musical correctness made
us queasy. They still, however, are smuggled in, as on the menu
of late Romanticism offered by the Kirov and their still
charismatic, if somewhat careworn music director Valery
Gergiev. A whole joint of Die Walküre and a sliver of Die
Meistersinger promised to be succulent and chunky enough for
any promenading gourmand. 'The Ride of the Valkyries' wasn't
scheduled, or at least not on the printed programme. You only
had to add up the timings for each piece and subtract from the
estimated finishing time to notice something was afoot (so much
for spontaneous encores). But this all-time favourite, played at
break-neck speed, was the rousing reward Gergiev gave his
audience, consolation for enduring the two gamey dishes which
made up the bulk of the evening: Schoenberg's symphonic poem
Pelléas and Mélisande and Scriabin's Prometheus: The Poem of
Fire Op 60.
Perhaps those names, Schoenberg and Scriabin, explain the
empty seats for what should have been a sell-out concert.
Daunted at the prospect of astringent, etiolated modernism,
people stayed away. In fact nothing could be more indulgent
than these two works, which ooze and glisten in puffy, buttery
splendour. Schoenberg wrote his Pelléas in 1902-3, about the
time Debussy was completing his opera to the same
doom-laden Maeterlinck play. Harps and bells, massed brass
(why use one trombone when five will do?) and quadruple
woodwind ensure the sort of roof-raising, ear-splitting blasts
which have recently prompted doctors, in all paradoxical serious
ness, to urge musicians to wear earplugs. That a genius on
Schoenberg's level could so mishandle his material gives him a
certain quaint charm to set against his familiarly forbidding
image.
The Russian Scriabin was another matter. Immersed in mystical
and messianic goings on, he was almost as obsessed with
Wagner as he was with India, perfume, spiritual and physical
ecstasy and, above all, himself. His one mark of distinction was
his claim to see colour through sound. To the synaesthetically
challenged among us, his outpourings all sound monotonously
purple. The Proms, keen to help us understand the true
subtleties, had mounted a small-scale light show for his Poem
of Fire (not to be confused with the almost identical Poem of
Ecstasy ), following the composer's guidelines.
Thus spotlights
of red, lime and blue cast their liverish light on the heads of the
Prommers. At the end, the Crouch End Festival Chorus rose to
quasi-metaphysical transcendent heights to provide the
wordless, ecstatic chorus, not dressed in the white robes the
composer wanted (and hoped the audience, too, would wear) but
nonetheless bathed in dazzling lights from overhead. The Kirov
played with appropriately languid swagger, and found their way
through the layers of roseate polyphony with valiant clarity, if to
little avail.
By the time they tackled Wagner, they seemed drowned in a
surfeit of notes. For one moment when Wotan (Vladimir Vaneev)
opened his mouth and rolled his Slavonic consonants round his
tongue, I couldn't think which Tchaikovsky - or was it
Mussorgsky? - he was singing. The shock realisation that this
was Wotan's Farewell in German indicates how far from
idiomatic, or rather the wrong sort of idiomatic, this performance
sounded. After the disaster of the company's recent Covent
Garden season of Verdi (the other reason, alas, for the empty
seats?), hopes were high that their Wagner would restore
standards. Gergiev should be as exciting a conductor as any in
this repertoire: febrile, perceptive, driven. In that Valkyrian
encore, some of the old brilliance was in evidence.
