What is it about Prokofiev that so riles the modernists? Even Stravinsky was prepared to allow that Prokofiev’s music had ‘personality’ whatever its aesthetic failings, but as recently as March this year one of our senior critics was to be found writing off the Classical Symphony as no more than ‘almost bearable’, attributing the composer’s supposed ‘failure to make a lasting imprint on the music of his time’ to a lack of musical personality. No matter that Prokofiev’s dramatic flair and matchless ability to write good (and so recognisably Prokofievian) tunes can be seen to have propelled his operas to something like repertory status.

The other significant factor has been the determined advocacy of Valery Gergiev. But can his ArtHaus set match the superb Paris production listed as a comparison? The truth is, that for all the dedication of the participants, it looks and sounds a little tired. The cameras catch distracting bits of activity in the orchestra pit at the edge of the frame, the recording is boxy, and the coup de theater of Napoleon arriving on horseback as Moscow burns (Vassily Gerello bravely unfazed) must have made more of an impact in the theatre than it ever could on TV. The score is more complete than in any previous staged production, though whether one should regard that as a strength or a weakness is a moot point.

The ‘extras’ include the uninspired overture; the granitic choral ‘Epigraph’ is deployed here uncut as a prelude to the opera’s second half. There’s 40 per cent more music in the 10th scene in which Kutuzov discusses battle tactics with his generals, several interpolated choruses of the Red Detachment of Women variety, and a ruinously long final scene with a middle section of patriotic fustian. Confused? You may be, because this is not the Kirov show as conceived by filmmaker Andrei Konchalovsky and transported to Covent Garden in 2000. That had greater cinematic fluidity between scenes and a radically shortened and re-ordered text. No, this Graham Vick production exists only on film, Gergiev having taken against it and reportedly left its giant abstract sets to rot in the snow. Perhaps he was irked by the omnipresent tree in the early stages. Later on, the sense of vast spaces waiting to be filled can be very striking.

The interpretation itself isn’t always very flexible, with Gergiev understandably at pains to keep things moving forward and together. The chorus, less beefy-sounding than you might expect, sometimes lacks discipline. Of the principals, Yelena Prokina as Natasha really throws herself into the role yet seems too nervy in close-up. Gerello is a steady Napoleon in both sets, but the outstanding performance, as on the Philips CD equivalent (6/93), is Olga Borodina’s lustrous Helena. While she can appear impassive on stage, her very rectitude is peculiarly appropriate to the medium of DVD.

The Paris production is so high-tech and its participants so healthy-looking that the Kirov version is otherwise eclipsed as a piece of pseudo-cinema. Unless of course you are either a Russian speaker or a Prokofiev completist in which case you may want both, and Gergiev devotees will be surprised to discover how much more conventional was his conducting technique in 1991.