It felt as though war and peace were locked in a battle for the very soul of this concert of Russian and Ukrainian music, a savage reminder three years on of the brutal invasion of one country by the other.
Things got off to an inauspicious start. Even conductor emeritus Vladimir Jurowski’s powers of persuasion couldn’t disguise the fact that Semyon Kotko is second-rate Sergei Prokofiev. Set in rural Ukraine, his 1940 opera ran into difficulties from the start: after Stalin and Hitler signed their notorious non-aggression treaty, a drama filled with marauding hordes of German invaders was distinctly on the nose. An orchestral suite was the composer’s way of getting some of it heard, but for all his evident warmth for the Ukrainian countryside (Prokofiev grew up in Donetsk), the inspiration struggles to rise above the commonplace. The most original movement here featured a garish execution sequence with more than a whiff of the firing squad about it.
