Not many people are familiar with Prokofiev's "Alexander Nevsky" cantata. After all, it's in Russian and has a checkered political history ... but it's also an exciting and dramatic piece, well worth knowing.

On Friday night, the Honolulu Symphony and Chorus offered audiences a rare opportunity to hear the work performed live, under the direction of conductor Norichika Iimori.

Prokofiev originally wrote the music for a 1930s film that blew in and out of favor with the winds of World War II: The story line, more patriotic symbolism than history, retold Russia's 13th-century victory over invading German armies. Rather than leave his music to the same fate as the film, Prokofiev rearranged it into the cantata performed Friday.

Prokofiev's vivid setting required large forces (the Blaisdell Concert Hall's stage was packed, including eight percussionists), created innovative special effects (the battle music is unparalleled — listen to the violas at the beginning of "The Battle on the Ice"), and included memorable solos for almost every instrument, including tuba and xylophone.

As amazing as the battle scenes were, Friday's highlight was the quietly powerful "Field of the Dead," featuring mezzo-soprano Margaret Lattimore, portraying a woman seeking her beloved among the wounded and slain. Appropriately dressed all in black, with a long, veil-like scarf, Lattimore proved riveting, capturing both the woman's mourning and patriotic fervor with her voice of richly burnished gold. Hers was a fabulous voice and a terrific performance.

The Symphony Chorus sounded wonderful, and Karen Kennedy has now been the chorus director long enough for "wonderful" to be followed by "as usual."

They faced exceptional challenges in preparing the work, including translating the Cyrillic alphabet into phonetics so they could learn their parts.

Their efforts paid off in a polished and very gratifying performance, the more so because Prokofiev did not showcase the choir in this cantata so much as he used it as just one of many orchestral resources.

The audience's standing ovation was well deserved by all —Lattimore, chorus and symphony orchestra.

Conductor Iimori delivered emotive readings of all three pieces on Friday: the Prokofiev, Rimsky-Korsakov's orchestration of Mussorgsky's "Night on Bald Mountain," and Tchai-kovsky's "Serenade in C major for Strings."

Iimori proved himself to be part of a growing "Romantic" aesthetic: composers and performers focusing less on the "Classical" ideals of clarity, balance and precision, and more on expression, passion, effect.

Conducting even calm passages with physical exuberance, Iimori drew out final notes (at times artificially long), used flexible tempos, and strove for dynamic extremes, from the quietest of quiet, on the edges of scratchiness, to thunderous climaxes meant to raze the walls.

Results were mixed, from magical moments of delicate translucence to almost comical exaggerations, as with the mid-measure stretches in Tchai-kovsky's Waltz.

And yet, for all his emotive showmanship, Iimori seemed unaware of the music's more subtle depths, particularly in darker, more complex passages, such as the tragic tone underlying even the Elegy's happily nostalgic mid-section.

Nonetheless, Iimori elicited focused and passionate playing from the orchestra, and his flair made for an exciting performance, enthusiastically received.

Friday's performance also raised critical philosophical issues: In the grand scheme of live classical music performances today, where does the audience fit in and who is taking care of its needs?

Prokofiev's cantata depicted a dramatic story sung in Russian, but the text/translation was in neither the program nor in supertitles.

It was wonderful to have Associate Conductor Joan Landry summarize the story, and showing a clip from the film was innovative, but once the piece started, the audience was left quite literally in the dark.

There was not even enough light to follow the story via the movement titles printed in the program.

In another piece, Friday's audience began applauding between movements; Iimori quickly cut them off, waited for silence, then continued.

There is, of course, a concert tradition not to applaud between movements, but that was a late-19th-century invention that would have astonished earlier composers.

Surely, both composers and performers would prefer enthusiastic applause almost anyplace in their pieces over carefully corralled and perfectly polite responses.

Generally speaking, audiences are not so unruly as to need conducting, and if we take away their right to express appreciation or dislike on their terms, spontaneously, as they see fit, we also take away one of the most important reasons to have live performances.