By Olga Fyodorova
…December of 1976. A national conductors’ competition has just closed
up shop in the Conservatory Big Hall in Moscow. Journalists immediately
flock around the contest’s winner Valery Gergiyev…
“What do you feel at this moment of triumph, Maestro – is it happiness,
fatigue, a sense of responsibility or any other feelings?”
“Frankly speaking, I’m absolutely flabbergasted! Really, there were
so many strong and seasoned people vying for the prize… I had little,
if any hope of winning; I just came over to try my luck, that’s all… And
now they gave me the first prize… I just can’t believe it…”
“And what’s your general idea of conducting? Is it really a hard
thing to do?”
“I guess it’s the hardest thing you can find in music, it really
is… Conducting is more than just swinging your arms in the air. A
conductor is a leader, someone who knows lots of things and immediately
fine-tunes to whatever is being played. A man like that is fully equipped
to handle a hundred-strong orchestra. To get to know all this you’ve got
to be old enough because it seems to me that conducting is not something
youngsters can do well…”
“How old are you now?”
“22…”
“Which means you still have a long way to go, don’t you?”
“Young age is a rare shortcoming that is quick to overcome, you know.”
Valery Gergiyev was born in Moscow in 1954. His parents both were
born in Ossetia, in the Caucasus Mountains. They are very musical too,
even though none of them is a professional musician. His elder sister
was the first to have a serious brush with music attending a music school.
The parents bought her a piano and Valery would spend hours on end watching
his sister play. Before long he was already fumbling with the keys picking
up tunes.
Boasting a rare talent for music, Valery had everyone telling him
to get serious about his music, but with his father’s business necessitating
constant relocations, the whole idea was next to impossible. Music
teachers advised Valery’s parents to send him to Leningrad to enter a school
for musically endowed children there and before long, he was on his way
north…
The school was just two blocks away from the Mariinsky Theater and
the youngsters frequented the operas and ballets they gave there.
Each time he entered the auditorium, Valery had his eyes fastened on the
stage and also on the orchestra pit, which he thought, was exactly where
the biggest magic was happening at the move of the little stick held by
the man in tails. Someday taking up the conductor’s place was now the biggest
dream of the boy, still unaware that a few decades later his dream would
come miraculously true.
Finishing school, Valery made easy work of entering the conductors’
department of the Leningrad Conservatory that happened to be just across
the square from the Mariinsky. Now, decades after, it seems that
Gergiyev was simply destined to take up the baton.
Joining the star-studded class of the formidable Professor Ilya Musin,
Valery quickly established himself as one of the most talented and hardworking
students they had there. He worked literally round the clock, forgetting
about food, sleep, walkabouts and other simple human joys. The results
of this workaholic attitude did not take long coming and at the still early
age of 22 Valery Gergiyev won a national competition and shortly after
that went to Germany to receive a medal of a winner of an international
conductor’s contest from the preeminent Herbert von Karajan….
Always on the lookout for a conducting manner all his own, Valery
Gergiyev partnered with various orchestras. Conducting an opera was his
biggest dream however and when they invited him to become one of Mariinsky’s
regular conductors, he immediately consented.
The Mariinsky’s chief conductor then was Yuri Temirkanov. Once Professor
Musin’s student himself, Temirkanov took a great deal of interest in his
young colleague. Later, taking up the local philharmonic orchestra, Temirkanov
handed his post to Gergiyev who, at 34, was put at the head of one of the
country’s oldest musical theater.
The newly appointed chief conductor was all set to add much-needed
zest to the elitist company. Auditioning the company’s star-studded troupe
of more than a hundred lead singers, he quickly realized that at least
half of them could be retired right away…
The trade unions, city and party authorities all stood up for Mariinsky’s
ageing divas immediately putting Gergiyev’s new job on the line. Unfazed
by all that onslaught, however, Gergiyev dug his heels in and pressed on
with his reforms with renewed zeal looking for young, talented and open-minded
singers.
Before Gergiyev’s took over, the Mariinsky Opera offered a meager
two premieres each year, but now not a single month passed by without the
company offering a new production. Gergiyev worked like a horse sleeping
just a few short hours each night and was busily getting his colleagues
accustomed to this draining schedule. Unable to cope, many quit,
but most of his colleagues stayed on fully trusting their ambitious young
leader.
Gergiyev was now taking his new work in London, Paris, Tokyo and
New York, each new project propping him higher and higher…
For all his round the clock artistic effort, however, Gergiev was
not averse to occasional administrative chores. With the theater now fully
under his control, Gergiyev doubled, or, rather, trebled, as their artistic
director, chief conductor and manager too.
Always looking ahead, Valery Gergiyev set up a young singers academy
right in the theater, as well as a junior orchestra and choir. He is now
going to overhaul the old building and erect a new one – an ambitious project
many well-known European, Asian and American architects are now vying for.
One of the world’s best-known musicians, Valery Gergiyev is the proud
holder of a wealth of international awards and distinctions.
Taking no break from his main job at the Mariinsky, Gergiyev also
conducts regularly at New York’s Metropolitan Opera, is the chief conductor
with the Rotterdam Symphony Orchestra and is also the musical director
of many prestigious international festivals, including the Stars of White
Nights event that traditionally opens the summer season in St. Petersburg.
Valery Gergiyev is a much hoped for stage partner for the world’s
top-flight musicians many of whom happily converge in St.Petersburg each
June, the city where Valery Gergiyev, the Citizen of the World, will always
feel at home…
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