A provocative pairing: given Stravinsky’s place as the high priest of modernism in the first half of our century, a salutary reminder that he and the short-lived Scriabin were almost contemporaries (only ten years difference between them); and that, of these two exactly contemporary works (1909-10), Prometheus, as Oliver Knussen has put it, is “so much more than a period piece; pregnant with possibilities for the future”, whereas The Firebird, aside from its “Infernal Dance”, rarely does anything more startling than pick up from where Rimsky-Korsakov left off – indeed, in certain sections, it shows that Stravinsky also knew his Scriabin rather well (for example, the Firebird’s “Dance of Supplication”).
Gergiev’s Firebird is certainly a startling performance. All manner of things probably contribute here to the impression of distinctive but completely natural pacing, timing, voicing and shading, among them Gergiev’s experience in the music of Stravinsky’s forebears, and the fact that this is that rare thing on record, an all-Russian complete Firebird. One has heard Western orchestras bring more grace to “The Dance of the Firebird”, but never have Western strings, in my experience, openly sung the final moments of the Princesses’ “Khovorod” quite like this. Once past the ballet’s opening bars, where, if you didn’t know the trombones were supposed to be there you would never guess, the music-making seems alive with a special presence: the orchestra is fairly close, though there is a real sense of the hall, never more so than when a heart-stopping crack is let loose from the drums on Kashchey’s appearance. But the primary presence here (obvious enough, but it needs saying) is of a man of the theatre, maybe too audibly (for some) breathing life into the proceedings, moving from one section of the ballet to the next with the transitional mastery of a Furtwangler, and taking risks with tempo (do hear the end of the “Infernal Dance”). The darkness to light of the ballet’s last few minutes is nothing less than mesmeric – we are in the presence of a happening.
Prometheus is equally compelling. Toradze’s solo contribution is slightly less the centre of the piece’s universe than Argerich in the recent sensational Abbado recording, in terms of both imaginative daring and recorded scale, though it never lacks character. And the benefit is to even up the soloist and orchestra dynamic. My only reservation about the Abbado concerned the relatively fined down impression of Scriabin’s huge orchestra. Yet with the more imposing-sounding Russian team, to take one example, when the five trumpets are let off the leash for their assertions near the end of the piece, you really know about it. Gergiev’s is also a much broader view of the piece (some four minutes longer), but it never sounds overly languid, indeed it enables him and Toradze, unlike Argerich and Abbado, to achieve a dizzying accelerando prestissimo in the final bars that is faster than anything that has preceded it. '