Valery Gergiev is giving two concerts in the final week of the Proms. On the penultimate night, Friday, he will conduct the World Orchestra for Peace in Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony, and on Monday he appeared with the Rotterdam Philharmonic - he is their artistic director - in another symphony from the second world war, Prokofiev's Fifth.
Prokofiev is one of Gergiev's great causes. He has done real missionary work for the operas, rehabilitating The Fiery Angel, Betrothal in the Monastery and most recently Semyon Kotko. While the symphonies, especially the Fifth, don't require that kind of proselytising, there's no doubt that his performances give the music a weight and conviction that confounds most criticism. He was assisted greatly here by the playing of the Rotterdam orchestra; they had seemed a first-rate orchestra in Parsifal the previous evening under Rattle, and here they attacked the symphony with real intensity, surging through the great string tunes with a rich depth of tone, touching in the woodwind detail that adds an acidulated edge to the climaxes with withering precision.
Most of the feeling of Soviet-inspired hack work that is hard to escape in this symphony was blown away by Gergiev's utter seriousness. Even the balletic scherzo took on an edge of menace, while the coda to the first movement was loaded with dark forebodings. In the finale the tension was ratcheted up to an almost unbearable extent. This may still have been Prokofiev putting an optimistic face on the horrors of war, but in this performance there was no escaping the hints of the tragedy that would well up in the Sixth Symphony, composed immediately afterwards.
There had been more Russian music at the start of the concert: the little Reverie that was Scriabin's second orchestral piece, and which already, in 1898, was looking forward to the endless sinuous melody and untethered harmonies of his more grandiose works. The orchestra floated perfectly. Gergiev also provided pungent support to the soloist Jean-Yves Thibaudet in Grieg's Piano Concerto, whose performance was full of big, bold gestures and flamboyant bravura - the old warhorse was dusted down and given a coat of high-gloss varnish.
