Documenting Operatic Heights So You Won’t Forget

If Valery Gergiev is on a one-man mission to produce a consistent view of the great works of the Russian operatic repertory, Philips has been there, for the past five years, documenting it on CD and in many cases on video as well.

The latest example, and the recording that Gergiev counts as one of the most successful efforts, is a just-released three-CD set of Borodin’s “Prince Igor,” featuring many of the singers he has fostered, including Olga Borodina, Galina Gorchakova and Gegam Grigorian. Gergiev has also rethought the problematical narrative structure of the epic opera and offers a new and convincing approach.

Available on both CD and video (laser disc and VHS) from the Mariinsky Theater are “Sadko,” one of Rimsky-Korsakov’s most fanciful operas, in a re-creation of a legendary production of the opera Diaghilev once presented in Paris; Tchaikovsky’s “Pique Dame,” and Mussorgsky’s “Khovanshchina” (in this case the video is a live performance, whereas the CD is a studio recording). Prokofiev’s “War and Peace” is available on CD only, although a video version of Graham Vick’s production for the Kirov, the most extravagant undertaking of the Gergiev recordings, is also awaiting release.

“Boris Godunov,” in a production created by dissident filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky at Covent Garden in 1983, and controversially imported to the Kirov by Gergiev in the wake of perestroika , is available on video only on the London label.

Gergiev has also made a number of orchestral recordings of Russian repertory for Philips, including the complete ballet scores for Prokofiev’s “Romeo and Juliet” and Tchaikovsky’s “The Sleeping Beauty.” And for a real curiosity, BMG has recently released a videotape of a performance of the Tchaikovsky First Piano Concerto made several years ago, with a young Gergiev accompanying a really young (15-year-old) Evgeny Kissin, as part of its low-priced series “Classic Encounters,” with introductions by Robert Winter.