Colston Hall, Bristol
The high profile of the Mariinsky theatre forces in recent years has stolen attention from those of Moscow's Bolshoi; this major tour by the Bolshoi Symphony Orchestra was clearly intended to redress the balance. Ill-health meant conductor Alexander Lazarev ceded his place to the young Kazakh Alan Buribayev, who already juggles three orchestras, including the RTE in Dublin. (Vassily Sinaisky and Alexei Stepanov share the conducting duties on the other tour dates.)
Buribayev's style is briskly efficient and, if he didn't risk anything dramatically different in his interpretations, who could blame him? Such is the weight of the Bolshoi tradition in their own ballet and opera repertoire, it could have spelt folly. In the sequence of extracts from Prokofiev's Cinderella, Buribayev encouraged players to exaggerate the witty and grotesque characterisations, while the dances themselves had a brilliant and authentically Russian flow.
Even if it's a cruel truth that a ballet score can be liberated when there are no dancers to consider, opera stripped of its proper context can suffer. Here, the Bolshoi's extracts from Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin ? one of the great operas ? only diminished it. Buribayev paced it all with an unseemly haste, which had little to do with the urgency of passion. Soprano Dinara Alieva coped with all the notes yet, denied the luxury of the unfolding drama, was unable to convey enough of Tatyana's inner journey or, in the final duet, what drives her to reject Onegin. Andrei Grigoriev's Onegin was strong on volume, but he lacked subtlety. Bluster ? both Grigoriev's and Buribayev's ? is no way to handle the infinite gradations of love and pain.
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