ANYTHING the Kirov can do, the Bolshoi can do better. That seemed to be the message from the Moscow giant as it opened its London season one day after its St Petersburg rival ended its season. No better way to impress, suggests the Bolshoi Opera, than by rolling out its great, timeless classic production of Boris Godunov — and preceding it, for the first night of its first visit to Covent Garden, with Francesca Zambello’s zany 2004 Moscow spectacular, The Fiery Angel, by Prokofiev.

Look in the cast list for the five-acter and you will see three skeletons, a chorus of nuns, Faust and Mephistopheles. And those are the bare bones. Add a deranged nymphomaniac, a Grand Inquisitor and a daffy fortune teller, and it is clear that difficulties lie ahead. The main problem is that Prokofiev does not really take a line. In its reworking of a Russian Symbolist novel, his laboriously composed score never gives a hint as to whether he is relishing its full grotesquerie and gore, fascinated by its psychology, or simply sending the whole thing up. There is a curious hollow at its heart.

So what can a director do? Well, this two-hour procession of tableaux really works best in the close focus of small-scale abstraction. But Zambello has a big stage and a huge company, and she is jolly well going to make the most of it. George Tsypin’s set displays floor-to-ceiling, crumbling palatial apartments that crack apart at moments of high drama; the stage is peopled with archetypal Zambello crowdscapes; a witches’ Sabbath is tortuously choreographed by Tatiana Baganova; and an auditorium box is filled with grey-suited apparatchiks.

Human detail goes for little. In Renata’s opening monologue, immense shadows scuttle over the walls; but the agonised visions of her sexual obsession are conveyed in obedient, baton-dominated singing by Tatiana Smirnova. The conductor, Alexander Vedernikov, seems to exercise every bit as much hypnotic control over her as the Count Heinrich/Fiery Angel of her deranged imaginings.

Vedernikov draws spectacular playing from the Bolshoi Orchestra. And he inspires the baritone of Boris Statsenko to give a fine performance as the hapless and much-put-upon Ruprecht. More magnificent resonant colours from the dark end of the Russian vocal palette, too, in Evgenia Segenyuk’s Fortune Teller, Alexander Naumenko’s Faust and Vadim Lynkovsky’s Inquisitor. And nicely needling tenors in Roman Muravitsky (Agrippa ) and Maxim Paster (Mephistopheles). But when Faust asks him, “Don’t the same old tricks bore you?”, the temptation to shout out a positive response from the auditorium is well-nigh irresistible.

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