Following on Valery Gergiev’s decent traversal of Prokofiev’s Alexander Nevsky with the Kirov Orchestra for Philips comes yet another all-Russian attempt to do justice to this very Russian work. Dmitry Yablonksy and the Russian State Symphony Orchestra manage to get through all the notes, but there are enough irksome lapses in the overall effort to prevent this from competing with reference-standard performances from Abbado, Reiner, Schippers, and others. From the outset, the scruffy-sounding Stanislavsky Chorus represents the undeniable weak link here, deflating the proceedings with slapdash ensemble, tepid tenors, underpowered basses, and screechy sopranos. They sound coarse and reedy at just the wrong moments (“Song about Alexander Nevsky” and “Alexander’s Entry into Pskov”) and unsteady and overwhelmed in sections that demand robustness (“Arise, ye Russian People”). It almost makes you want to root for the Germans.
After a very promising opening in “Russia under the Mongolian Yoke”, which Yablonsky takes quite slowly, conveying a palpable sense of menace and mystery in the growling accented tremolos, the rest of the cantata gradually descends into mediocrity, both as a performance and as a recording. As soon as this movement ends, the low brass and percussion appear to recede into the orchestral fabric, disturbing the balances and compromising the heavy foundation required for this work’s success. String textures also become fuzzy and artificial-sounding–note the messy Largo section of the “Crusaders in Pskov”–and in the same movement the bass drum, so vital in this work, lacks the necessary terrifying impact. The thrilling “Battle on the Ice”, the big test of any Nevsky, comes off fairly well, although some listeners might note that the spritely Allegro section following the yawning “Peregrinus” outbursts is sluggish and thus does not erupt with the white-hot intensity found in several other recordings. Mezzo-soprano Irina Gelahova executes her solo in “The Field of Death” with aptly reserved anguish.
The filler items owe their final realizations less to Prokofiev and more to Gennady Rozhdestvensky, who arranged and compiled these pieces originally composed for aborted stage adaptations of famous Pushkin works. Either way, they do not represent Prokofiev’s finest work. As stand-alone tidbits, though, the Eugene Onegin excerpts do have a sort of saturnine charm (namely, the inebriated-sounding brass in the Menuet and the vaudevillian Mazurka), while the Polonaise from Boris Godunov has all the exuberant enchantment of a Tchaikovsky scene de ballet. As a whole, these excerpts are cute curiosities, but not enough to redeem the disc’s disappointing centerpiece.
