Edinburgh International Festival 8th-31st August 2008

‘Valery Gergiev is a born Prokofiev interpreter.'

- The Guardian

Prokofiev's Seven Symphonies review  by EIF Critic, Fraser Riddell

Gustav Mahler famously commented that the symphony should be like the world: it must embrace everything. Prokofiev dissolves such romantic notions; sometimes brutally nihilistic, his symphonies seem to embrace nothing and his world is that of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land. Could Valery Gergiev and the London Symphony Orchestra at least set these lands in order?
 
This was a relentless evening- if the preceding evening saw the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra present a concert of exhilarating joy and sublime transcendence, Gergiev's LSO was earthbound, snarling and brutal. Even the cheeky playfulness of the 1^st symphony was imbued with a robustness that signalled disdain for its classical forebears. This was no fond pastiche.
 
I wanted to be moved by the remainder of the programme, to feel once again the spine-tingling moments of the evening before, but this music left me cold. The tenuously structured Second Symphony seemed less ‘theme and variations' , more like ‘car-crash followed by pile-up'. I was struck by that odd incongruous feeling of observing a world-class orchestra playing with great commitment, but appreciating only the energy they were putting in and not the sounds that were coming out.
 
If this concert cemented anything it is my belief in the subjectivity of any personal response to music. Listen to this wonderful orchestra lead by a potentially exhilarating conductor and find your own response- you are the music while the music lasts. 
 

- Fraser Riddell