Battling a head full of demons

As the Mariinsky season winds down, so Moscow's Bolshoi company has arrived for a month-long season which opened with Prokofiev's problematic and unnerving study of madness, The Fiery Angel. If this Soviet-Russian surfeit has felt punishing, it has also yielded riches and the chance to hear this rarity must count among them.

Yet even a director of Francesca Zambella's ingenuity could not find an easy path through this episodic piece, where the magic-realist narrative leads us into bizarre territory, as in the sudden encounter with Mephistopheles and a Fortune Teller. Mostly, however, we are inside the head of the heroine, Renata, together with a jostle of crazed demons. It's not a pretty place.

George Tsypin's set, a miserable apartment block, was properly oppressive but dwarfed the somewhat sketchy dramatic performances.

Tatiana Smirnova sang the marathon role of Renata with stamina, but lacked the requisite acting skills. Boris Statsenko's Boris, her would-be lover, sang decently but moved woodenly. Alexander Vedernikov, conducting, brought out some expressive string playing. However uncertain Prokofiev's dramatic skills, he could certainly make an orchestra dazzle.

Katerina Ismailova/Mariinksy
Coliseum
***

Whereas those high, yelping glissandi sounds dominated in Fiery Angel, the opposite was the case in Shostakovich's Katerina Ismailova. All the heft of this vast score seemed driven from an inferno of bass instruments, tubas, double bassoons and so forth, ferociously conducted by Valery Gergiev. This is the 1963 cleaned-up reworking of his Lady Macbeth of Mtsenk, but its impact is still brutal, even in this woefully pedestrian staging.

Hearing this version, which has its merits, made us re-examine our assumption that unexpurgated is always best, while reaching no firm conclusion. Gergiev will bring the original Lady Macbeth to the Proms on 20 August. Whether she is welcome will depend on your hunger for completism.

Bolshoi (020 7304 4000). Mariinsky (0870 145 0200).

Bolshoi Opera: The Fiery Angel