"Actor: Aleksander Toradse"

• Valery Gergiev In Rehearsal | DVD | (22/04/2002) from £16.44   |  Saving you £3.55 (17.80%)   |  RRP £19.99

  The passionately scruffy St Petersburg conductor gets as impressive and fiery a sound out of the Rotterdam Philharmonic as he does out of his own Kirov/Maryinsky theatre orchestra in Valery Gergiev in Rehearsal. The programme here starts with Stravinsky's early showpiece Fireworks and moves into the brooding neo-classical Piano Concerto with Alexander Toradze as soloist. The heart of the concert is Prokofiev's Scythian Suite, his largely successful attempt to produce a ballet score as radical and shocking as Stravinsky's Rite of Spring; Gergiev is passionately committed to this music and sees its heart as being as much caught up with quiet interludes of almost chamber-music dialogues between instruments as it is with the work's huge climaxes. The symphonic fragments from Debussy's oratorio Le Martyre de Saint Sebastien is almost as charismatic a piece of paganism. This is an intelligent concert because it is constructed around an implied dialogue between three composers trying to find a new sound world for the 20th century. The accompanying documentary shows Gergiev at his most charming and Mephistophelean rehearsing the Prokofiev, and gives a full account of the origins of the score. On the DVD: Valery Gergiev in Rehearsal is presented in a standard 4:3 visual aspect and has adequate, though not remarkable, PCM stereo sound. --Roz Kaveney