Russian Orchestra Masters Prokofiev

Prokofiev’s wartime Fifth Symphony, his grandest, most epic and most popularwork in the form, is a massive emotional mural depicting nothing less than, in the composer’s words, “the greatness of the human soul.” Thursday night, the Russian National Orchestra performed the 55-year-old work with appropriate splendor and breadth.

The Hollywood Bowl was the right place for the catharsis the piece delivers. And the musical details provided by the visiting ensemble gave the entire performance genuine force as well as authenticity.

Deputizing for the orchestra’s injured (but recovering, we are assured) founder/music director, Mikhail Pletnev, associate conductor Andrey Boreyko encouraged full-throated, intense playing from the ensemble.

He failed to mold the dynamic excesses of the opening movement into a convincing whole--it seemed to ramble--but the subsequent movements fell tightly into shape. Blazingly impassioned but controlled playing informed by pungent and telling balances made this an exceptional experience.

The first half of the program, devoted to Beethoven, also displayed the orchestra’s virtues. The “Egmont” Overture had the elegance of darkness and sobriety and polished surfaces.

Unfortunately, the Third Piano Concerto, in which the veteran Ukraine-born Vitaly Margulis was the soloist, fell short in those same qualities. This is a work that, for all its sonic transparencies and surface lightness, comes to life only through drama.

Margulis, well known as a master teacher on both sides of the Atlantic--he has been on the UCLA faculty since 1994--gave the familiar piece a respectable and accomplished reading, but one without the urgency or compulsion we know the score contains. What one got instead was regularity. Boreyko and the orchestra gave solid support.