Gergiev leads the Mariinsky Theatre's return to the Hong Kong Arts Festival for an unmissable season of opera, concerts and ballet

"Mr. Gergiev led the accomplished players with a sense of breadth and vigor" The New York Times

Valery Gergiev's leadership as Artistic and General Director of the Mariinsky Theatre has brought universal acclaim to this world famous institution. Hailed as "the world's most charismatic conductor" by The Financial Times, he is also Principal Conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra and Principal Guest Conductor of the Metropolitan Opera.

One of the world's most acclaimed orchestras, the Mariinsky Orchestra is a model of disciplined playing, rich in perspective and personality. The thrillingly vivid playing has captivated audiences around the world for over two centuries, and the HKAF programme is designed to show off the Orchestra's full strength.

The first evening draws on the Mariinsky Theatre's rich stage history and features dramatic music by the Theatre's longtime associate Tchaikovsky and the formidable Wagner.

The second, all-Russian concert is very personal to Maestro Gergiev, featuring symphonies by two Russian composers that he champions - Prokofiev and Shostakovich, as well as the delightfully diabolic Baba Yaga by Liadov.

Mar 27
Wagner         Prelude to Lohengrin, Act III
Tchaikovsky  Romeo and Juliet Fantasy Overture
Wagner         Die Walküre, Act III
  Wotan             Alexei Tanovitsky
  Brünnhilde       Olga Savova
  Sieglinde         Yekaterina Shimanovitch
  The Valkyries   to be announced

Mar 28
Liadov            Baba Yaga, Op 56
Prokofiev       Symphony No 1 in D, Op 25, Classical
Shostakovich  Symphony No 7 in C, Op 60, Leningrad

Of the handful of classical musicians who might be considered a living legend, Russian conductor Valery Gergiev would be one of the first to spring to mind. He's been so heavily decorated that you wonder how he comes up for air – musical accolades from around the world interleave with pan-European citations for his achievements in cultural development and dialogue. And it's hard not to think of the 56-year-old as a personification of the symbolic Russian bear with his voracious appetite for work, a physical appearance that’s far from manicured and a fiercely protective instinct for his country's artistic treasures.

Chief among those is the Mariinsky Theatre in St Petersburg for which Gergiev wears many hats: as the institution's Principal Conductor and Artistic Director, he has responsibility for orchestral, ballet and opera production. His influence in all these areas will be evident during the 2010 Hong Kong Arts Festival.

Born in 1953 and raised in the Russian province of North Ossetia, Gergiev studied conducting at the Leningrad Conservatory (now the Saint Petersburg State Conservatory) and soon began turning heads. His first engagement at the Mariinsky (then called the Kirov) was for a performance of Prokofiev's opera, War and Peace, when he was 25. Just 10 years later, in 1988, he was appointed Chief Conductor and Artistic Director with an overwhelming thumbs up from both artists and administrators.

When the Soviet Union began to unravel shortly afterwards, state funding for establishments such as the Mariinsky looked set to follow suit, prompting Gergiev to step in with a dose of artistic, financial and political invigoration that has been working wonders ever since. Springing onto the podium and striding into the Kremlin to catch the appropriate ears go hand in hand for the maestro, who saw his dreams for a new concert hall come to fruition in 2006, and whose next goal of a new 2,000-seat opera house (slated to be functioning by December 2011) looks set to open up comparisons with New York's Lincoln Center.

The groundwork for these achievements began not long after Gergiev's appointment, when his missionary ideas started to gain substance: touring extensively to raise an international profile for the company; embracing elements of modernity in the repertoire; performing operas in their original language; and supplementing established Russian performance traditions with contemporary developments. Since that time, numerous ticks have appeared in all those boxes.

Outside Russia, Gergiev's gruelling schedule currently whisks him between commitments as Principal Conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra (LSO) and Principal Guest Conductor of New York's Metropolitan Opera, plus regular touring engagements with the Vienna Philharmonic. Fears that such a heavy load might jeopardise the integrity of his performances are rarely realised. Packed houses and rave reviews are the norm.

Critics' pens were exercised, however, when the Mariinsky first presented Wagner's Ring cycle in 2003, a production in which Gergiev's hand was all-pervasive. Reviews of the production side continue to be mixed, despite ongoing revisions, but what the chapter underscores is Gergiev's determination to take the company internationally centre stage by grasping such a musical icon and fashioning it with unmistakably Russian fibre.

Act Three of Die Walküre (The Valkyrie), the second opera in the cycle, will be performed in concert at the first of two programmes given by the Mariinsky Orchestra. With no stage trappings, the focus will be on Gergiev's reputation for digging into the music's core. The Ride of the Valkyries – Wagner's exhilarating orchestral romp – is just the curtain-raiser for this colourful and emotionally intense conclusion to the most popular of the cycle's four operas.

Gergiev is a champion of Prokofiev's seven symphonies. Written between 1918 and 1952, a number of them have found only sporadic favour with programme planners, but Gergiev has both recorded and toured them with the LSO. Since August of last year alone, he has mounted cycles of the works at the Edinburgh Festival and in Paris, Tokyo and New York where the press highlighted his "steely control" and "stunning insights" that produced "electrifying" concerts and "incandescent" playing (The New York Times).

Prokofiev's Symphony No 1, Classical, will be heard in the Mariinsky Orchestra's second concert. Modelled on the airily conceived symphonies of composers such as Haydn, the work may seem tame in comparison to what was to follow in Prokofiev's symphonic catalogue, but tameness is hardly likely to be the bottom line for Gergiev's interpretation. To quote a critic from The New York Times once more: "I will never again be able to hear it played like a Neo-Classical delight without thinking the performance is playing it safe."

The three other Russian works in the orchestra's programmes are Liadov's Baba Yaga, Tchaikovsky's Romeo and Juliet fantasy overture and Shostakovich's Symphony No 7, Leningrad. The last of these is a work of gargantuan proportions, written in honour of the spirited response to the Nazi invasion of Leningrad in 1941. Members of the audience finding themselves relegated to the Cultural Centre's choir stalls for this performance might, in one respect, have the advantage.

With or without a baton, Gergiev's conducting technique from the shoulders down might sometimes seem ambiguous to people in the stalls. But from where the players are sitting, it's his eyes that are renowned for giving laser-like instructions as to what he wants. These two small windows to Gergiev's musical soul, combined with a spontaneity that's often lurking near the surface of a performance, can achieve results that make the option of staying at home and listening to a CD a complete no-no.

Dennis Kiddy is a freelance music teacher and writer based in Hong Kong.

An Imperial Feast: The Story of the Mariinsky Theatre
by Natasha Rogai

The most surprising thing about walking into the Mariinsky Theatre (Мариинский театр) in St Petersburg is that despite its large size it feels so small. There is a curious sense of intimacy to this jewel box of a theatre built in 1860. Looking round the exquisite white and gold interior with its blue velvet seats, it is easy to imagine the Tsar and his family in the imperial box, watching legendary performers like Cecchetti or Chaliapin. The past seems alive here – behind the magnificent curtain designed by Alexander Golovin in 1914 lies the stage where Nijinsky and Nureyev made their debuts, where Pavlova was the first to dance in modern-style pointe shoes (her contemporaries considered this innovation "cheating") and ballerina Mathilde Kschessinska, mistress of Tsar Nicholas II and two Grand Dukes, used to perform wearing real diamonds.

Not only are the history of ballet and opera alive at the Mariinsky, but no institution better reflects the recent history of Russia. In the building's 150 years of existence, it has been in turn the theatre where the Imperial Court came to see and be seen, a bastion of socialist political correctness under the communists and a flagship for the entrepreneurialism of post-Soviet Russia. Named originally after the Empress Maria, wife of Tsar Alexander II ("Mariinsky" is the adjective from "Maria"), during the Soviet era it was rechristened the Kirov after a hero of Bolshevism – just as its home city of St Petersburg became Leningrad. Today it is again the Mariinsky and incontestably one of the world’s top companies in both ballet and opera.

Through all the vicissitudes the Mariinsky has endured, it has continued to preserve its extraordinary artistic legacy – all the more remarkable in the performing arts, with their inherently ephemeral nature. In its golden age during the second half of the 19th century, the theatre was the birthplace of a succession of masterpieces including The Sleeping Beauty, The Nutcracker and Boris Godunov which today are staples of the international repertoire. (Part 1*)

Natasha Rogai is the dance critic of the South China Morning Post and Hong Kong correspondent of The Dancing Times and a member of the Executive Committee of the Hong Kong Dance Alliance.

*For Part II, please click here.
For Part III, please click here.