With all eyes on the South Bank this week, the Barbican has had to raise its game.

It did so in style last night with the climax of the Stravinsky/Debussy/Prokofiev series under Valery Gergiev.

This final concert, including Prokofiev's rarely heard Cantata for the 20th Anniversary of the October Revolution, was shown live on the Barbican Big Screen in Broadgate Arena and will be broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on 19 June.

First came Stravinsky's Les Noces, in which the Russian peasant nuptials were celebrated by a cast including Olga Savova and Gennady Bezzubenkov, together with members of the Mariinsky Chorus.

For all that these performers were singing in their native language, and for all Gergiev's characteristic drive, it lacked the raw, ancestral quality and theatricality of the revelatory performance by the Pokrovsky Ensemble under Ades three months ago.

Then came an oasis of calm in the shape of Debussy's First Rhapsody for Clarinet, with LSO principal Andrew Marriner as the mellifluous soloist.

But the real event was the Prokofiev.

This extraordinary work is a setting of revolutionary texts by Marx, Lenin and Stalin for two professional choruses (here the magnificent Mariinsky and London Symphony Choruses), amateur chorus, symphony orchestra, wind band, percussion ensemble and accordion band.

It opens with a setting of Marx's dictum about philosophers and the world: the priority being to change it.

Already, Prokofiev's enthusiasm for the job in hand - his stated sympathy for the Revolution and his return to the Soviet Union in 1936 have often proved embarrassing for commentators - is apparent in the unfolding of a broad tune worthy of Alexander Nevsky.

The drama reaches its climax with a re-enactment of the events of October 1917.

Lenin's texts ("The machinery of oppression has been toppled from its place.

That is the most important thing") may lack poetry but they are used to galvanise the massive forces - six extra trumpets, here ranged at the side, machine gunfire, a tocsin, a siren and six accordions - to fever pitch.

It's unexpectedly thrilling stuff and Gergiev pulled it off triumphantly.