The only things missing from the final pages of Prokofiev's Alexander Nevsky Cantata are a parade of wild horses or a cascade of fireworks. He uses every other means at his disposal - a small army of percussionists, a huge chorus and a barrage of brass writing - to create a patriotic pageant in celebration of Nevsky's victories and the freedom of the Russian people.

Richard Hickox's performance with the London Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, marking the 50th anniversary of Prokofiev's death, was a technicolour realisation of this bombastic score.

Compiled from his music for Eisenstein's film, Prokofiev's Cantata depicts the achievements of this 13th-century Russian hero as he slaughters the Teutonic invaders on the ice of Lake Chud. The composer's orchestral imagination is unfailingly evocative. The Battle on the Ice begins with the frozen sounds of strings playing near the bridge and rasping woodwind lines, while the chorus depicts the barbarian enemy with mock-medieval plainchant. When the ice cracks, and the Teutons and their horses drown in the freezing water, Prokofiev creates huge torrents of orchestral sound that engulf the players and the audience. Hickox and his legions of musicians unleashed the power of this unflinchingly direct music.

But Alexander Nevsky is not simply a dramatisation of great deeds and victories; it is also an important emblem of Russian music and culture. In 1938, the film found favour with Stalin and the Soviet authorities as a celebration of Russian heroism and, on the surface, nothing could be more authentically Russian than Prokofiev's grandiose score.

While Prokofiev chose to return to Russia in the early 1930s, Igor Stravinsky remained in exile. At the Barbican, Hickox also performed Stravinsky's Pulcinella, a piece much less likely to raise questions of Russian musical identity, with its reworking of 18th-century Italian music. And yet, hearing the two works one after the other, it was the Stravinsky that sounded more authentic.

Through the artifice of using music by Pergolesi, Stravinsky found a way of expressing generalised emotions of love and loss. With its three soloists - here, the suave tenor of Kenneth Tarver, Sara Mingardo's warm-toned alto and the characterful bass of Lorenzo Regazzo - Pulcinella was at once intimate and universal. Alexander Nevsky is tied to a historical moment, but Pulcinella is released by its negotiation between past and present. In that sense, Stravinsky's music seemed more profoundly "Russian" than Prokofiev's.