Some others in the family went to hear Gergiev and the Mariinsky Theatre orchestra perform Swan Lake at the Proms – my elder son’s first Promenade concert.
This went down well. We have a recording of the complete score, but it seems to me to have its longeurs which would in the theatre be covered by dancing. On the other hand a suite of highlights can be abrupt and seem too much like ‘greatest hits’. The Mariinsky’s performing version, used at this concert, came out somewhere between the two and avoided these traps. (I was following the concert at home on the radio).
The performance had one or two slips but I was assured that these didn’t matter because of the verve and idiomatic approach of the Russian performers. And the Eastern European brass sound (a feature of many of the LPs I’ve been putting on CD) is not extinct in St. Petersburg.
The Guardian‘s review can be found here.