Commissioned by Lorin Maazel for his first season as music director of the New York Philharmonic in 2002, The Enchanted Wanderer is that rarest of beasts – an opera actually meant for concert performance. Whether Rodion Shchedrin, Russia’s veteran musical magpie, has actually written an opera of any sort is open to discussion. “Scenic cantata” might be a closer description, or “secular oratorio”, though given the drenching the score receives from the perfumes of Russian church music even that needs a question mark.

Whatever its pigeonhole, the work is a hard one for Westerners to enjoy, as the wriggling audience at Tuesday’s UK premiere discovered. For owners of a dark Russian soul, prospects may be brighter. Shchedrin’s compact libretto, distilled from a novella by Nikolay Leskov, the author of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, spoons out little but wailing as its Storyteller (a role shared between the three soloists) traces the life of a prince’s servant, condemned to love the same gypsy girl as his master.

As is their wont, Valery Gergiev’s Maryinsky Opera Company pressed home every misfortune. Kristina Kapustinskaya, hands perpetually clutched, couldn’t have been more heartfelt as the gypsy doomed never to find the bluebird of happiness; while Sergey Alexashkin and Yevgeny Akimov (servant and prince), plus the chorus, made ringing use of their own deep throats.

But the big hurdle remained Shchedrin’s uneven, elongated score – strongest in the imaginative orchestral passages of drunkenness and shepherd’s flutings, and the keening postlude, drabbest in the maundering polyphonic laments and the overrefined use of folk instruments. Why bring a balalaika at all if you can only hear it with a magnifying glass? Gergiev managed this heavy burden of a work very well, but a burden it remained.

Earlier in the day, soloists from the Budapest Festival Orchestra presented their own folk-tinged programme at the Queen’s Hall. Dohnányi’s Piano Quintet, Op 1, wrapped us in a mildly pleasant Brahmsian embrace. More individual music and sharper timbres emerged with Enescu’s wind Dixtuor. Ten wind instruments fighting for limited space doesn’t sound very pretty, but the Budapest players made a suave job of their difficult assignment.