Good and bad news about this Prom. It offered the chance to hear the entire Sleeping Beauty – all 177 minutes of it. That’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and it rightly attracted an enormous audience. Not even Tchaikovsky got to hear all his music, as some was cut before the 1890 premiere and has rarely been resuscitated, even at the Maryinsky Theatre.

But if we had all the notes, we also had nothing but the notes. Not a tutu was in sight. And though Tchaikovsky’s inexhaustible melodic inspiration and stunningly inventive instrumental textures gripped the attention for most of a long evening, there were moments – indeed, whole movements in Act II – when hearing what was obviously intended as filler music offered little excitement without seeing what business the dancers were doing.

That was one problem. Another was that the work’s sheer length seemed to have overspilled whatever rehearsal time Valery Gergiev and the London Symphony Orchestra devoted to it. One had the distinct impression of top-notch players being not quite sure what was round the corner, and constantly needing to make lightning-quick but nevertheless noticeable adjustments.

I don’t know how often The Sleeping Beauty has come the LSO’s way, but the orchestra didn’t quite seem to have the idiom in its bones. I missed the sumptuous weight of string sound that Russians bring to this music. Much of the playing was gracefully nuanced and balanced, and polished individual contributions came from the violinist Andrew Haveron (playing the virtuosic solos Tchaikovsky composed for Leopold Auer), clarinettist Andrew Marriner, flautist Gareth Davies and oboist Emanuel Abbühl. But elsewhere it often sounded a bit too reticent and British.

That was surprising, given that few top conductors are as immersed in the world of Russian ballet as Gergiev, the emperor of the Maryinsky. But I was struck by how rarely he ignited the score with any real passion or even flair. His mind seemed elsewhere, perhaps on his troubled Ossetian homeland.

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