IDEALLY, the programme informed us, the composer would
have liked the audience to be clad in white robes. Scriabin’s
Prometheus: The Poem of Fire was intended as part of a
massive project called Mysterium: a son et lumière spectacular
fusing the arts and involving a “colour organ”. The Proms have
been experimenting with coloured lights throughout the season, but
for Prometheus they came at last into their own.
Purples, reds and other lights played on the stage area throughout
the score, and as the final F sharp major affirmation rang round the
hall, the direction for the colour organ — pearly blue, the colour of
moonlight — was realised.
At that point, too, the audience, strafed by spotlights, did indeed
appear to be clad in white. It was quite a coup and given the
power of Valery Gergiev’s performance with the Kirov Orchestra,
ably assisted by the Crouch End Festival Chorus, the total effect
was properly overwhelming.
The opening of the tone poem evokes a primordial cosmos before
the heroic act of Prometheus bringing fire to mankind. Gergiev
caught the languorous atmosphere here and weaved a sumptuous
carpet of sound with his players. He took care, however, to
ensure that all the threads were in place, allowing the prominent
trumpet lines, among others, to make their mark.
The eccentricities of pianist Alexander Toradze were eclipsed by
the grandiose eccentricity of the whole, though his feral grunts
were still audible from the far side of the hall.
Gergiev’s dynamic yet fluid approach was also eminently
successful for Schoenberg’s massive tone poem Pelleas und
Melisande. The onward rush, verging on breathlessness, is
balanced by purposeful punctuation, and there is room in his
reading for both light, skittish episodes (Melisande playing with her
ring) and for sombre statements emanating out of the Stygian
gloom.
Framing these two scores were Wagnerian extracts from The
Mastersingers (a sensuous Act III Prelude) and Die Walküre
(Wotan’s Farewell and the Magic Fire music).
Gergiev’s Wagner is vibrant, invigorating and heady, though as he
showed in the glowing final pages of Die Walküre, he can also
draw from the Kirov a tone of smouldering warmth and amplitude.
Vladimir Vaneev, a Kirov Opera principal, sang the part of Wotan
with musicality, but in a light baritone far removed from the heroic
bass baritone envisaged by Wagner.
