Nothing exceeds likes excess. The Mariinsky version of Prokofiev’s wild and sometimes wonderful War and Peace, which returned to the Met on Monday after a five-year lapse, boasts a cast that would make any statistician delirious. Called to duty for this 4¼-hour marathon were 52 soloists, 118 choristers, 41 dancers and 227 supernumeraries, not to mention a horse, a dog, a goat and four chickens. Somehow, I missed the chickens.

The conductor, of course, was Valery Gergiev. He directed the musical sprawl and the expressive traffic with much sweep, fair cohesion and chancy precision. Refocusing the Tolstoy narrative, Andrei Konchalovsky imposed fluid, quasi-cinematic images on George Tsypin’s skeletal set, the action precariously centred atop a revolving dome. The result: a very busy, reasonably modern, intermittently poignant night at the opera.