Kirov Goes All-Out in Russian Opera Mix

Conductor Valery Gergiev and the Kirov Orchestra and Chorus are like a good punk rock band. They don’t waste time with unnecessary refinements. Their sound is loud and raw, their beats hard and driving, their tempos up. Don’t expect pretty. Forget sentimentality. They are in your face. Gergiev even wears a sneer most of the time.

Wednesday, in their second program in as many nights at the Hollywood Bowl, Gergiev and the Kirov concentrated on music from Russian opera, with time out for a piano concerto, which turned out to be just as theatrical.

The Kirov performers held nothing back. The brass was caustic and edgy, the lower contingent positively sinister. The percussionists didn’t appear to care if their instruments survived the evening. The strings pressed until the sound sizzled. The chorus howled. The results weren’t always balanced, but they were so full of vitality and commitment that it hardly mattered.

The second half of the evening proved most satisfying. In excerpts from two Mussorgsky operas and Borodin’s “Prince Igor,” these musicians let rip with well-drilled abandon. The chorus also showed that it could sing softly and with nuance (the women sang ravishingly in the “Polovtsian Dances”).

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In Mussorgsky’s final scene from Act III of “Khovanshchina” and the Coronation Scene from “Boris Godunov,” baritone Nikolai Putilin provided a fluid yet stentorian Ivan Khovansky, and a darkly expressive Boris, burly and clarion of voice. Tenor Nikolai Gassiev filled in smaller parts firmly.

Gergiev prefaced these vocal excerpts with the purely orchestral “Khovanshchina” Prelude, in a single arch of a reading, unhurried, flowing, fading into silence.

The concert had begun with a steely, sleek and, though it’s not supposed to be, comically fast run-through of Glinka’s “Russlan and Ludmilla” Overture. It continued with Alexander Toradze as soloist in Prokofiev’s thorny Second Piano Concerto.

As subtle as a freight train, Toradze pounded out the music as if it had no shape of its own. At slow tempos, he liked to prod the notes deliberately, pulling and stretching them like taffy and punctuating them with heavy accents. In bravura passages, you fully expected either him or the piano to crumble.

His playing asked the question “How much is too much?” and answered it with “This much!” His technique was up to it; the music wasn’t always, though the sturdy piece held up pretty well, considering. One sensitive Bowl listener burst out with a lusty, lone “bravo” after the second movement--it somehow seemed fitting.

Gergiev and the Kirov had no apparent trouble following Toradze’s ways and matched him in muscle.