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Performances by the Mariinsky Theatre Orchestra and Valery Gergiev at the Wales Millennium Centre in Cardiff have inspired British audiences.
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The Guardian newspaper gave the Mariinsky Theatre its top rating of four stars for its performance of Richard Wagner’s opera Parsifal on 31 March, a work which, according to critic Andrew Clements, “entwines sex and religion so queasily.” Clements focussed on Valery Gergiev’s conducting style, seeing in it the maestro’s “wonderfully supple handling of the score and his almost faultless dramatic shaping of it, reinforced by his orchestra’s fabulously refined playing.” Of the protagonists, the critic made particular mention of “Evgeny Nikitin’s engaged Amfortas,” “Nikolai Putlin’s stentorian Klingsor” and “Larisa Gogolevskaya’s Kundry, focussed and dramatically intense”. The performance of Gustav Mahler’s Eighth Symphony on 1 April drew a storm of delighted reviews. In addition to the Mariinsky Theatre Chorus, the concert also featured the BBC Wales National Chorus and the Only Kids Aloud children’s chorus, which was created especially for the Mahler project. Critic Stephen Walsh considered Mahler and Wagner’s works to be “thematically linked,” Gergiev having specifically selected these two pieces for the tour to Cardiff. He believes that this is expressed in “a certain kind of solipsistic religiosity that talks about God in the way some people talk about their ancestors. We don’t really need them any more, but they make us feel important.” The writer “praised the Russian singers and the Mariinsky orchestra,” picking out Viktoria Yastrebova and Sergei Semishkur in particular. “Under Gergiev’s curiously indecipherable (from the audience) hand, with its shakings and wavings, its seeming unrelatedness to the beat yet obviously effective control, everything came together, and the performance entirely deserved the wild enthusiasm that greeted its deafening E flat major close.” But “the real story of this Mahler,” according to Walsh, lay in the choruses which “truly participate in the symphonic working, just as much as the instruments do. Even the spacing of thenbsp;choirs is part of the organic design, and that was particularly the case here because Gergiev had the children’s choir in between the woodwind and brass sections of the orchestra, with the Mariinsky and BBC NOW choruses well back.” Regardless of the fact that “it was a bold decision to move the children so far forwards,” this “wonderful ensemble performed its role to perfection, by memory, with a warm and resonant tone”. One Welsh news portal commented on the “hugely charismatic Valery Gergiev, galvanising the immense forces before him,” the “tremendous form” of the Mariinsky Theatre Orchestra, the “notably adroit brass playing” and “the fresh and utterly captivating voices of Only Kids Aloud”. In the run-up to the Cardiff tour, The Daily Telegraph published an article about Only Kids Aloud’s recent performance in St Petersburg. One of the complexities of the project lay in the fact that “half of these kids had never listened to classical music before, let alone Mahler, and on top of that they had to sing in Latin and German. But they weren’t scared of it, there was no fear.” The article includes a comment made by maestro Gergiev about the idea of Mahler himself, who “wanted to have the sound of children’s voices in the Eighth Symphony because through this symphony he embraced almost all processes in life. It is very much connected with the triumph of the human spirit”. The Mariinsky Theatre’s tour to Great Britain under Valery Gergiev continues – today at the Barbican Hall in London they will perform Verdi’s Requiem, while 6 April will see a concert performance of Wagner’s opera Parsifal in Birmingham. | |||
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