Prom 42: Monday 15th August at 7.30 p.m.(Swan Lake)

[Petrushka]

Where indeed were the sweep, majesty, nuance and sheer tensions of the 1976 BBCSO account ??!!

Alison, I will never forget Haitink's 1976 BBCSO account of extended highlights heard that night via R3. Did you ever find the recording in the Alison Archives?

[Alison]

Good old dad has come across it on one of his reel-to-reel tapes.

He had it all lined up for me when he knew I was visiting a couple of months ago.

What a perfect selection of numbers, with a performance very much of the symphonic variety
according to Ferret's analysis. The right length for a symphony too - about 53 mins worth !

[Mahlerei]

Apart from an extraordinary performance I saw at Covent Garden in 1976 I have very fond memories of recordings by Ansermet (heavily cut) and Lanchbery. The latter's LPs appeared in a smart red and silver Du Maurier box.

[Chris Newman]

Don't we all wish it had been Esa-Pekka Salonen on Monday?

[alywin]

My friends in the hall were amazed when I decided to leave after Act I, so it comes as a bit of a relief to me that I'm not alone in my dislike of the performance. Is the marvellous apotheosis at the end missing completely in the Drigo version?

Ferretfancy, assuming from what you say that you were in the arena, then you definitely weren't the only one. I stuck it out, but really wished I hadn't bothered. I deliberately avoided the Mariinsky Swan Lake at Covent Garden over the last 3 weeks because I know I don't like the production, so I can't definitely confirm the apotheosis, but I'd always thought that my niggles with it were due to the choreography and so on: it wasn't until Monday night that I realised it was down to musical sensitivity as well. Stripped of the dancing, my brain was going "huh? why does that bit come back there when we've already had it once?" and "doesn't that really totally break the mood?" in a way I'd never noticed before. I'm listening to the Previn version, which is pretty largely as originally written, as I type, and I notice the "Valse Bluette", which is in the Royal Ballet's version, definitely isn't in that recording. The Previn recording seems to point up the links with the other ballets, and other Tchaikovsky works, much better, and some of the excised sections sound far more "Swan Lake" than the additions do.

As for the performance, well, I'm glad it wasn't being danced, because I think any dancer would have blanched at trying to keep up with some of Gergiev's tempi. And not even a breathing space between any of the items - the whole thing just felt horribly rushed. Some of the more heavily orchestrated sections just sounded really crass to my mind. Distinctly lacking in "sweep, majesty, nuance" as Alison says. With hindsight, I suppose that, having just spent 3 weeks at Covent Garden, it would have been unrealistic to expect anything but their normal performing version from the orchestra, but I had been hoping for some of the excised chunks too, including the ones which Balanchine used for his "Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux". Given the case Gergiev made for Sleeping Beauty a few years back at the Proms, (not to mention Romeo & Juliet and, I think, The Nutcracker elsewhere) I'd expected something similar for Swan Lake - albeit it's generally regarded as not being on the same level as his later ballets - and we definitely didn't get that.

[alywin]

That said, in The Arts Desk, Ismene Brown, who is usually very picky about the way ballet music is played, largely appreciated the performance: http://www.theartsdesk.com/index.php...giev&Itemid=27

[bluestateprommer]

Heard this just recently as part of the iPlayer recap of selected Proms from this past summer, having missed it the 1st time. While listening to it, I found myself thinking of the Mel Brooks remake of To Be Or Not To Be, where his star Shakespeare production is "Highlights from Hamlet" (to those who haven't seen this film [as opposed to the 1942 original, but I digress]), and thinking that this Prom was like "Highlights from Swan Lake". I even thought that I recognized a number from Sleeping Beauty interpolated into this version, which threw me for a loop. I find myself more in sympathy with Petrushka & EA overall in the evaluation. While this certainly marked the first complete performance of a version of Swan Lake at The Proms, methinks that the Prommers are owed a complete performance of the complete version of Swan Lake, as Pyotr Ilyich originally wrote it. Fingers crossed that you get the full original version in due course.