By Richard Morrison [Times Online, 25 January 2010]

It was a British opera company — Sadler’s Wells, in 1972 — that presented the first complete staging of Prokofiev’s Tolstoy adaptation. Now a remarkable Scottish-Russian collaboration has led to the world premiere of this epic masterpiece in its original version. And it is startlingly different. Where is the ear-splitting choral roar that usually opens the work? Or those tractor-thumping anthems to indomitable Russian peasants and their saintly leaders?