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Early on, he thrived on heightening the emotional content of a score, which explains the tempo extremes that make his Tchaikovsky — one release of “Francesca da Rimini” and the Fifth Symphony, the other of Shakespearean fantasies — so thrillingly explosive when he finally gets to the quick stuff.

They join Beatrice Portinari and Francesca da Rimini, the only two historical women from the "Divine Comedy" who had acceptable entries on Wikipedia prior to our work.

In “Francesca da Rimini,” however, the animation was all to the good, and the audience roared, deservedly, when it was over.

It opened with the Prelude and Liebestod from Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde”; continued with Tchaikovsky’s tone poem “Francesca da Rimini”; and closed with the orchestral movements, arranged as a suite, of Berlioz’s multimedia sung-danced-acted “Romeo et Juliette,” which ranges at some length through colorful incidental music and love music, and ends by dying out quietly, like the snuffing of a candle.

A highlight of her 2006 “Russian Album” with Mr. Gergiev is an aria she has never performed onstage, from Rachmaninov’s short opera “Francesca da Rimini.”