BBC Proms
Schnittke - Viola Concerto (UK premiere)
London Symphony Orchestra / Valery Gergiev
Royal Albert Hall / BBC Radio 3

The Times
Geoff Brown

Gergiev, Gergiev, the man is everywhere, fluttering his fingers in Russian repertory from one podium to the next. Who else would occupy the Albert Hall with two sets of musicians on three consecutive nights, shaking, jumping and sweating through some of the most turbulent music ever written? Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique Symphony, Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District and the Babi Yar song symphony: does Gergiev never conduct the quiet, the mouse-like?

But fears of Gergiev overkill were knocked on the head in the excitements of Friday’s Prom with the London Symphony Orchestra. Freed from the Barbican’s acoustic prison, the orchestra sounded voluptuous. In Shostakovich’s Golden Age ballet music they were brilliant almost beyond belief; scarcely less so in the first half of the Pathétique, before fatigue or Gergiev’s erratic fingers cast a slight veil. And the phantasmagoria of Schnittke’s Viola Concerto, nobly traversed with Yuri Bashmet, achieved something all too rare with the Proms’ itchy audiences: rapt silence for a while after the last note sounded.