Trailer for Valery Gergiev documentary titled, You Cannot Start Without Me
By Bob Ramsay
Next Tuesday and Wednesday, Valery Gergiev is bringing his Mariinsky Orchestra to Roy Thomson Hall. Gergiev has to be the busiest conductor in all of classical music, and his orchestra is constantly on the go. But home ground for them all is the Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg, Russia. Here, in an opera house built in 1860, Gergiev…..well, Gergiev rules!
He oversees the Mariinsky Orchestra, the Mariinsky Opera and the Mariinsky Ballet and their 2,000+ employees. (By the way, if the name “Mariinsky” is new to you, all of the above organizations used to be called “Kirov,” a recent name change that reflects the respective organization’s original names long before the Soviet communists decided to reward one of its leaders with this ‘naming opportunity.’
I first went to St. Petersburg in 1999 and that trip turned me into a life-long fan of Gergiev and the Orchestra. Why? Because they’re so incredibly good. You don’t have to know much about classical music to immediately hear how sharp their brass section is, or how Gergiev draws out huge emotion from his players with the flicker of his hand. At a time when it’s hard to tell the difference in the sound one Orchestra produces over another, there’s no mistaking the tumultuous, head-long and driven sound of the Mariinsky.
Back in 1999, I was at the Festival Gergiev had just started, called the White Nights, and there were so few people from the West that they printed up only 50 house programs in English — and you could smell the gestetner ink on them! Today, Gergiev has turned his Festival and the Mariinsky into one of St. Petersburg’s major industries. The White Nights Festival is a six-week gathering of some of the world’s top singers, dancers and players. Gergiev has built a sparkling new concert hall in addition to the aging Mariinsky Opera House. And those of us from Toronto can take special pride that architects Diamond + Schmitt have been chosen to design the new Mariinsky Opera House, which will open directly across the canal from the existing one.
The canal?
Well, St. Petersburg is an intriguing city on many fronts: it’s first of all a treasure trove of Russian culture (including home to the mighty Hermitage Museum, with its millions of paintings and artifacts). But it’s also a city founded by Peter the Great in 1703. Or rather “dug out of a swamp,” because that’s what St. Petersburg was. It had to be drained and then ‘canalled’, which it is today. It’s not quite Venice, but St. Petersburg has many beautiful canals running off the Neva River. Most of all, the city is what Peter the Great intended it to be those centuries ago: Russia’s window on to Europe. Located at the very western tip of Russia, it faces Finland and the west as the symbol of the new Russia’s cultural renaissance.
And there’s no bigger player in that rebirth than Valery Gergiev and his Mariinsky Orchestra. After all, who was that man conducting at the Closing Ceremonies at the Olympics a couple of weeks ago? Gergiev. Why was he there? Because Russia, and specifically the mountain-seaside town of Sochi, will host the 2014 Winter Olympics.
So if you want a taste of just how different – and excellent – the best of Russian culture can be, come to Roy Thomson Hall next week.
Guest contributor Bob Ramsay of RamsayInc.com – is a music enthusiast, Gergiev disciple, journalist and a speechwriting, presentation training, self-proclaimed people herder who is a great friend of the halls.
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