3 / 5 stars
Royal Festival Hall, London

For no obvious reason, the London Philharmonic Orchestra is in the middle of a "magic" month, "featuring music of enchantment and sorcery". This all-Russian concert qualified by including Stravinsky's The Firebird and, at one remove, by beginning with Prokofiev's Third Symphony, for that score grew out of the music for the opera The Fiery Angel, which deals with demonic possession and exorcism.

A production of The Fiery Angel at Covent Garden a decade ago demonstrated that, with a production of flair and imagination, the piece can be made to work on stage. But the symphony is another matter. Even with a conductor of flair and imagination like Valery Gergiev, the music lacks focus in the concert hall, and sounds like what it is: a collection of vivid gestures originally intended to underpin a text and a theatrical scenario. Gergiev worked the music hard, and the LPO played a difficult, noisy piece with more refinement than it probably deserves, but the effect remained diffuse.

Not so diffuse, though, as Prokofiev's Fifth Piano Concerto, especially with Alexander Toradze as the soloist. Toradze supplied all the qualities that make the work sound meretricious: shallow, clangy tone, lumpy phrasing and an ability to make every melody sound banal - not that this concerto needs much help in that respect. It was never a comfortable, let alone enjoyable, experience.

After all that, The Firebird - the complete ballet, rather than one of the suites - was a positive delight. Gergiev relished the score's array of pastel shades as much as its flashes of primary colour. In the succession of sensuous melodic lines cushioned by string tremolandos, each seemed more gorgeously moulded than its predecessor. Rhythms were sharply profiled (the Infernal Dance had a steady menace about it) and the offstage trumpets and Wagner tubas were perfectly integrated with the overall sound. There can be much more sonically spectacular accounts of this glittering score, but few as subtle, affectionate and careful to show how Stravinsky's orchestral mastery was so profoundly embedded in the Russian tradition