Gergiev, Kirov Opera Bring Boundless Intensity to N.Y.

It can’t go on like this. He has simply got to slow down.

That’s what they were saying about Valery Gergiev last year. And the year before. And the year before that.

That’s what they were saying when all Gergiev had to do was galvanize the chaotic Kirov Opera, take the company, of which he is principal conductor and artistic director, on the road several times a year, guest-conduct in Europe and America practically every free evening (and double-book on a few that weren’t free) and direct Stars of the White Nights Festival in St. Petersburg, Russia, and the Mikkeli International Festival in Finland.

Lately, though, Gergiev has also become principal conductor of the Rotterdam Philharmonic and will inaugurate its annual Gergiev Festival in September, and he is about to tack on a fourth festival, a biennial with the Santa Cecilia Orchestra in Rome.

So to prepare for all this, Gergiev is on a little American vacation with his orchestra, chorus and some soloists from the Kirov. This week they are tourists in New York, featured at Lincoln Center Festival 96 for four different programs, leisurely spread out over five days. They weekend in the Berkshires, with a fifth entirely different program at Tanglewood. Then, next week, it’s sun and fun in Southern California, along with six consecutive nights at the Hollywood Bowl. This time it’s only 4 1/2 new programs, along with an actual repetition of a work (the only one in 11 concerts given over two weeks on two coasts) that was heard here Tuesday night in Avery Fisher Hall.

If this sounds insane, it is. Especially when you add in the fact that much of the repertory is comprised of large-scale major works and some definite oddities. But if it seems that burnout is inevitable, don’t count on it. This is what Gergiev does, and this combination of orchestra, chorus and its leading mezzo soprano, Olga Borodina (who will also appear at the Bowl), is white-hot. Gergiev certainly has them busy burning the roof off Fisher.

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The Kirov’s second Lincoln Center program concentrated, as did the first, on officially recognized and sponsored Soviet music, this time music by Prokofiev, a Gergiev specialty, composed with Stalin looking over his shoulder. Two of the pieces are great and famous Prokofiev, the “Alexander Nevsky” Cantata and the wartime Sixth Symphony.

But the opener was something else--”Zdravitsa,” Opus 85. It was commissioned by the All-Union Radio Committee in honor of Joseph Stalin’s 60th birthday in 1939. And it is surely the weirdest, most unsettling music Prokofiev wrote.

“Zdravitsa,” which means “a toast,” is a 10-minute setting for large orchestra and chorus of a text taken from folk songs of different Slavic nationalities. The words pay sickening homage to Stalin (“Son, grow tall like a stalk of blue cornflower / Stalin will be the first words on your lips.”)

Two years earlier, for a cantata Prokofiev wrote with innocuous texts by Stalin, Lenin and Marx (and played by the Kirov Monday), Prokofiev produced exciting but fairly conventional official music. Here, he experiments with innovative effects he never repeated, including a wild section for the chorus dramatically roller-coastering through rising and falling scales in a way that Philip Glass might well admire. It is as if one can actually hear the alarm in Prokofiev’s mind. Even the Kirov singers and musicians looked a little bewildered at the end of the hair-raising ride.

The Sixth Symphony, which followed, is moody, tragic music for the end of a war whose victory brought with it horrible suffering. Gergiev took it slowly and emphatically, maybe too slowly and emphatically, but the points were made with an intensity of sound and phrase rarely encountered.

Prokofiev’s great score for “Alexander Nevsky” served to colorize Eisenstein’s classic black-and-white Soviet epic, and the cantata based upon that score nearly always succeeds in bringing back unforgettable cinematic imagery. Gergiev’s inspiring performance adds not just resplendent Technicolor but also the wide screen. Borodina’s performance of the lament over the field of the dead is evidence that she has become one of the greatest tragedians singing in opera today. There may be no roof to burn off the Hollywood Bowl, when Gergiev brings this “Nevsky” to the Bowl Tuesday, but there are plenty of speakers to fry.