Famous for his drive and his intensely busy work schedule, and credited with saving the Kirov Orchestra, Valery Gergiev is on his way to Dublin. The master conductor talks to Chris Stephen in Moscow.
On Monday a music phenomenon hits Dublin in the form of conductor Valery Gergiev and the Kirov orchestra. His fiery style, explosive energy and designer stubble have marked him out as Russia's best and most flamboyant conductor. To many of his countrymen he is more - nothing less than the saviour of Russian opera.
Scroll back 15 years and the Kirov was on its knees: the Soviet Union had collapsed, and with it the lavish state funding that once paid the bills. The theatre reverted back to its Tsarist name of Mariinsky, but, with bankruptcy looming, many wondered if it could survive.
But cometh the hour, cometh the man, and for the Mariinsky it came in the unlikely form of its young chief conductor. Gergiev, now 53, was born on the opposite side of the country, in North Ossetia, a distant province in the heart of the Caucasus. He was no prodigy, but his piano playing was good enough to win him a place in the Leningrad music school. And here his true talent, for conducting, was realized. By 25 he was a deputy conductor at the Kirov, and in 1988 he was full conductor.
Stepping into management, his first move was to stop the leakage of stars heading to the West. He told them they would do better in a rejuvenated theatre than working on their own in the West. Some believed him, but all wondered where the money was coming from.
His next task was to bring in hard currency through touring. In 1991 he flew to London and, using sign language because of his ropey English, persuaded Covent Garden to arrange an exchange programme.
It was the start of an ambitious touring schedule that has made the Mariinsky the musical equivalent of the Harlem Globetrotters - they spend at least as much time out of the country as back home. Typical of his commercial astuteness was the decision to retain the name Kirov for their tours, on the basis that this was better known in the West.
The outside world responded, charmed by his desire for partnership: half a dozen foundations were set up to pump money into the Mariinsky.
Then Gergiev really got to work. He created a youth orchestra and training school, providing a feeder system to put the theatre on a solid footing. Russia, then as now, has a seemingly bottomless pit of talent; Gergiev's mission was to catch it and channel it. By 1996 the Mariinsky directors bowed to the inevitable, making Gergiev the director.
And, 10 years later, a mark of his success is how infuriatingly difficult it is to see the great man. Since he is on the road more than he is at home, the only place you are sure to find him is at one of his performances.
Thus it is that I interview him not in some plush restaurant, but right after he had conducted Shostakovich in front of one of the world's most demanding audiences - at the Tchaikovsky Conservatory in central Moscow. The Conservatory building may be crumbling, but the audience know their opera, many of them raised in the 1950s and 1960s when Soviet culture was supreme.
The thunderous applause has hardly died before he appears in the small anteroom set aside for him. Waiting are family members in black standing around a black piano. He emerges in black trousers and white shirt, his face shining, and settles on the piano stool.
"No photos, please," he says, explaining that he does not want to look haggard. In fact, he looks as rugged as ever with that perfect designer stubble.
HIS WORK RATE is extraordinary. Not content with running both ballet and opera, he is also guest conductor at Rotterdam, the New York Met and, from January, the London Symphony Orchestra too. And he runs festivals in Finland, Vienna and Israel.
"I think I have to rest a lot more," he says, tugging at one of his shirt cuffs. "I am a person who cannot organise his holidays." Orson Welles famously said that Italy's torture and suffering produced Michelangelo and the Renaissance, while Switzerland's peace produced only the cuckoo clock, and Gergiev feels the same way about Russia. The turbulence which has dogged Russian history has, he believed, produced the great passion of both its composers and its singers. And presumably its conductors.
"Maybe life is a little bit more difficult here," he says. "Drama in Russia is, as you know, unfortunately where a lot of blood is spilt." Politics came crashing into Gergiev's life two years ago when the Beslan High School massacre unfolded, a few miles from his family home. His reaction was to set up a festival, For Peace in the Caucasus, to raise money, and awareness, for a war that often seems forgotten. "Nobody can bring the children back, I do not treat this in a modest way," he says. "The Caucasus deserves better."
BACKSTAGE AT THE Mariinsky is an exhilarating experience, rather like being in the engine room of a speeding ship. The hundreds of dancers, musicians, singers and technicians form a big family, not always a happy one, and not always united, but all showing the same mix of admiration and fear of the boss.
A measure of Gergiev's success is the fate of Russia's other great theatre, the Bolshoi. A succession of directors have come and gone, all complaining about their inability to wrestle discipline into this Moscow juggernaut. Stars refuse to perform, workers go on strike and the loss of confidence has seen it crank out endless productions of The Nutcracker for the tourists. In desperation, a few years ago, the Russian government inquired whether Gergiev would like to run both theatres. No, he told them, he had his hands full in St Petersburg. "We work a lot harder, we produce a lot more," he tells me.
Perhaps the least-reported element to Gergiev's one-man mission to rescue Russian culture are his failures: while good on the heavy stuff - Wagner and the Russians - he has been known to slip up with Mozart and Verdi, famously getting tut-tutted at his first season at Covent Garden. Gergiev bristles at the suggestion: "I've just conducted Mozart in Vienna," he says, stopping himself from adding, "And there were no complaints". In fact, the occasional misfire is the flipside of Gergiev's genius: his restless pursuit of excellence produces the odd banana skin, but when he gets it right, everyone knows it.
Success has brought a different set of problems: audiences complain that he is never there, although he says he tries to make sure that at any one time either the orchestra or the ballet are in town - the other will be touring. And, he says, the future for opera and ballet is to tour, and mix. "if you find a conductor who performs in his own country 50 times that's a lot," he says.
And now, finally, he has got a little elbow room. Russia's government, flush with cash from its oil boom, has guaranteed him the finance to build a new theatre of gold-coloured steel and glass across the Kryukov canal from the main building.
Despite the cooling of relations between Moscow and the West, cultural ties remain strong and the invitations for Gergiev's orchestra keep pouring in. And the mission remains. "The question today is how we can help young people to grow, to become truly important artists. To take a rather good promising artist, well trained, to a good solid level is maybe not so difficult. But to find every year another one, that is something," he says.
His energy levels appear undiminished, and his commitment to the theatre undaunted by a recent marriage to Natasha, a 22-year-old musician, with whom he has two young children. So what keeps him going? "If you grew up where I grew up, maybe there's that extra bit of incentive."
The Kirov Orchestra conducted by Valery Gergiev performs at the National Concert Hall, Dublin, on Monday at 8pm