One thing that seems not to have changed in Russia is that only authoritarians get things done. "This country is very big," Gergiev told me. "If your voice is very soft and you don't make it clear that this is the way things should go, they probably won't go." But Russia is not his only arena. Nurturing the Mariinsky requires Gergiev to be a strongman adept at dealing with other Russian strongmen; yet to gain the foreign currency and fame that the company needs, he must build its reputation - and his own - in a Western environment that views such characters and tactics with suspicion. He says he is resurrecting great Russian music regardless of its political content, but this is itself a political position. He is the world's foremost champion of the Russian musical patrimony, which in the West might be viewed as a form of cultural exchange but within Russia can serve the purposes of ultranationalists. Dealing with such contradictions may be an evolutionary survival tool for Homo postsovieticus. "Gergiev was a graduate of the Soviet conservatory with a Soviet teacher, but in spite of it, Gergiev is a post-Soviet man with a post-Soviet spirit and culture," said Leonid Gakkel, a musicologist who works with him.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/15/magazine/15gergiev-t.html?scp=1&sq=gergiev&st=cse

March 15, 2009
The Loyalist
By ARTHUR LUBOW

BEFORE A TEARY AUDIENCE of war-fatigued residents and young Russian soldiers standing on tanks, Valery Gergiev conducted a concert last August in Tskhinvali, the devastated capital of South Ossetia in Georgia.

The burned-out hulks of bombarded buildings testified to the fury of the fighting that took place when Georgia unsuccessfully tried to seize control of its breakaway region. Russian troops had occupied the town barely a week earlier, in support of the secessionist Ossetians. Speaking in English as well as in Russian on a live television broadcast, Gergiev told the crowd, "I am Ossetian myself," and explained that he had come "to see with my own eyes the horrible destruction of this city" and to perform a concert in honor of the dead. "If it wasn't for the help of the Russian Army here, there would be thousands and thousands more victims," he said. "I am very grateful as Ossetian to my great country, Russia, for this help."

It was an extraordinary moment - yet it was classic Gergiev, both in his bold flair for the unexpected and in the visceral power of his musical program. He opened with the brooding, resigned strains of Tchaikovsky's Fifth Symphony, and then, in a gesture heavy with political overtones, he followed with the tragic and defiant Shostakovich Seventh, the "Leningrad" Symphony, which was composed during the Nazi siege of that terribly suffering city and became a worldwide emblem of Russian resistance during the darkest days of World War II. As if his selection of this hallowed music was not charged enough, Gergiev made it explicit. Tskhinvali "can be called a town hero," he said to the cameras, in fractured English. His point was clear: like Leningrad, the Ossetian capital had withstood ruthless aggression. Gergiev's music making was not just notes off a score: the conductor was riding the emotional wave of a common heritage - and echoing the exaggerated claims of Russian leaders that the Georgian shelling was a genocidal war crime.

Of course, not everyone shares this vantage point. Gergiev's position as a Russian conductor of international stature requires a tricky geopolitical straddle, with one leg planted firmly in the motherland and the other extending to the West. Western observers - including many in London, where Gergiev is the principal conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra - condemned Russia's invasion of Georgia as a return to the hegemonistic ambitions of the Soviet Union. Even those who criticized Georgia's provocative adventurism and brutality wondered whether, in his use of the "Leningrad" Symphony, the conductor had lost his sense of proportion. Gergiev was caricatured as a flunky for Vladimir Putin, the Kremlin strongman who presumably was calling the shots in Georgia. Gergiev and Putin have been friends since 1992, when Gergiev was already an internationally famous conductor and the artistic director of St. Petersburg's Kirov Theater and Putin was merely the first deputy mayor of the city. They share a deep attachment to St. Petersburg, and Gergiev has relied on Putin's support for his theater. "I don't know of any case in musical history, except maybe for Wagner and mad King Ludwig of Bavaria, where a musician has been that close to a powerful ruler," Richard Morrison, the chief classical music critic of The Times of London, told me.

Gergiev's patriotism runs deep. When in 1988 he became artistic director of the Kirov (which was later renamed the Mariinsky), he made it his mission to restore the works of great Russian composers that under Soviet rule had been presented only in cut and varnished versions and to introduce those pieces that had never been played at all. Because of Soviet suppression and Western indifference, large parts of the Russian canon had been neglected. Gergiev has been particularly successful in popularizing overlooked works by Prokofiev, one of his favorite composers. Thanks to him, Prokofiev's early "Gambler" and late-career "War and Peace" have entered the standard operatic repertory. To the displeasure of some, he has also resuscitated Prokofiev's propagandistic vocal pieces, including "Cantata for the 20th Anniversary of October" and "Zdravitsa (Toast to Stalin)." Gergiev says that the political content of these pieces - and whether they contribute to a broader movement in Russia to restore Stalin's reputation - is not his concern. As he put it to me: "I think we are not here to learn more about Stalin. We are here to learn more about Prokofiev."

BUT SEPARATING MUSIC AND POLITICS is seldom so easy in Russia. From the czars through the Soviets, music has occupied a quasi-sacred role in Russian life, with an importance that is only now breaking down under the barrage of capitalist commercialism. In the mid-19th century, if a composer like Mussorgsky wanted to put a historic czar like Boris Godunov on the stage, he needed approval from the imperial administration. Failing to recognize how little had changed under Communism, Prokofiev displeased Stalin when he included Lenin's own words in the "Cantata." (Stalin's commissars rejected it.) That was typical: after Prokofiev returned from Paris to live in the Soviet Union, his life was a succession of misunderstandings and battered hopes, as his commissions were rejected or forced into repeated revisions. Shostakovich's fortunes fluctuated even more drastically between official favor and disgrace. "In the Soviet Union the nomenklatura" - or ruling cadre - "were not stupid," Gergiev told me. "They annoyed Prokofiev and Shostakovich more than others, but they knew these were No. 1 and 2. They knew it was a powerful voice, and they wanted it to be not too critical. Shostakovich and Prokofiev were the best counterparts to the West."

At his concert last summer in Tskhinvali, it should be apparent, Gergiev's insertion of music into the Russian political context followed in a long tradition. But whatever you make of the politics, the performance was also characteristically Gergievian in its drive to burst through the prissy, buttoned-up corsets that bind classical music, with the aim of releasing a dangerous vitality. In that way, too, Gergiev is very Russian. From the works of Mikhail Glinka to those of Shostakovich, the core of the Russian repertory is infused with a direct emotional appeal. When he conducts those scores (indeed, when he conducts anything), Gergiev is seeking a gut connection between the music and the audience. I watched him rehearse the L.S.O. in Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring" in London in late January, as he reminded the players repeatedly that this was a ballet depicting pagan tribes and culminating in a voluntary human sacrifice. "For me, the most important idea is not the rhythm," he said. "That is not what is most unusual in Stravinsky. I think we have to go to more primitive music. It is starting to sound like Debussy, and it is pagan music." He wanted the piccolos to play more unevenly: "It shouldn't sound like love music from Mendelssohn." He mugged like a savage in an old, non-politically correct movie, his shoulders hunched, head wagging, eyes rolling back and forth. "It should be a little more wild," he said.

Gergiev, who is 55, lives the way he conducts - on the brink. "He gets bored when things are too well planned," the stage designer George Tsypin remarked to me. "He actually told me that. He needs that edge." He packs so much into his schedule - fund-raising, press interviews, administrative meetings, a staggering number of musical performances and, when all the rest permits, reunions with his wife and children - that he inevitably arrives late at concerts, misses some rehearsals and at times conducts pieces with players who are underprepared.

Detractors complain that Gergiev is no longer a musician; he is a politician and a businessman. Within Russia, that criticism often masks a nostalgia for the Soviet system, when artists did not have to worry about commerce. Even those who suffered under the old regime can mourn lost aspects of it. "People only did their profession, they played their instruments or were singers," Nina Kogan, a pianist from an eminent musical family, told me in Moscow. "People were very closed off in our country. They didn't know soap operas on TV, they didn't know pocketbook novels. Now there is so much around, and people are not so interested in music. A professional musician cannot earn enough money with his profession to live."

In the new Russia of flash and cash (a sphere that is deflating rapidly in the economic crisis), Gergiev recognized that opera, ballet and the symphony must compete with popular entertainment. The captive audience of the Soviet Union is gone, and the Mariinsky needs stars who are sexy celebrities, with international reputations and gossip-magazine appeal, like Anna Netrebko, Olga Borodina and Dimitri Hvorostovsky, whose careers Gergiev helped set in motion.

One thing that seems not to have changed in Russia is that only authoritarians get things done. "This country is very big," Gergiev told me. "If your voice is very soft and you don't make it clear that this is the way things should go, they probably won't go." But Russia is not his only arena. Nurturing the Mariinsky requires Gergiev to be a strongman adept at dealing with other Russian strongmen; yet to gain the foreign currency and fame that the company needs, he must build its reputation - and his own - in a Western environment that views such characters and tactics with suspicion. He says he is resurrecting great Russian music regardless of its political content, but this is itself a political position. He is the world's foremost champion of the Russian musical patrimony, which in the West might be viewed as a form of cultural exchange but within Russia can serve the purposes of ultranationalists. Dealing with such contradictions may be an evolutionary survival tool for Homo postsovieticus. "Gergiev was a graduate of the Soviet conservatory with a Soviet teacher, but in spite of it, Gergiev is a post-Soviet man with a post-Soviet spirit and culture," said Leonid Gakkel, a musicologist who works with him.

In his Mariinsky office, Gergiev sits beside two framed portraits, one of Tchaikovsky, the other of Rimsky-Korsakov, each inscribed by the composer to the theater. I asked him what he made of the fact that many of his former friends who knew him when he was a conservatory student complain that the artist they remember has been replaced by a wheeler-dealer. "There are artists who do not care who is in the government," he replied. "A society like America, they don't even have to know the name of the president if they are working in Hollywood. But the wrong man in the Kremlin makes the country tremble, and everything gets crushed. The right man can make things go well. If you run the Mariinsky and say you don't care what is happening in the government, you are a liar."

IN AN AGE WHEN MUSICAL CONDUCTORS are contractual employees, Gergiev is a throwback to a more autocratic era. You have to return to Herbert von Karajan, conductor-for-life of the Berlin Philharmonic, to find a comparable personality. "At the Mariinsky, my responsibilities are near limitless and my own possibilities are near limitless," Gergiev told me. Under him, the Mariinsky, with 2,000 employees, has become one of the world's great musical institutions, offering an enormous program of opera, ballet and orchestral music, both at home and abroad; a star-spangled summer festival; and a wealth of illustrious recordings on the Philips label. Indeed, so strong is the organization that it will begin this spring to issue its own CDs, as Gergiev's artistic ambitions have outgrown Philips's commercial constraints. "Did they want to do a Mahler cycle?" he asked, rhetorically. "No. Beethoven, no. They didn't even want all of Tchaikovsky. I am committed to the history of Mariinsky more than Philips is committed to make serious recordings. They are not allowed to let the bottom line go down. I am allowed." Soon the new Mariinsky label will begin to release opera DVDs too, recorded with a $14 million piece of high-definition equipment that Gergiev procured with a government grant.

The situation was radically different in 1988, when Gergiev was elected artistic director by the company. At that time, the Kirov, as it was called, had a world-class ballet company, but as for the orchestra, it wasn't even the best in Leningrad. That distinction was held by the Leningrad Philharmonic. When the Kirov artistic director, Yuri Temirkanov, left to become the philharmonic's chief conductor, the minister of culture appointed his successor. It was the heyday of perestroika under President Mikhail Gorbachev, however, and the Kirov musicians demanded their say. When they were allowed to vote, Gergiev, who had been an impressive assistant conductor and received Temirkanov's support, won by an overwhelming margin. He was 35.

"It is really impossible to understand now what it was like at the beginning," Gergiev told me. "The situation of Russia in '89, '90, '91 was near impossible. The country was basically breaking up. We just had to perform." With no money to pay musicians and no repressive authorities to confine them, the musical talent of the country - one of the great legacies of the Soviet Union - was leaving the country like water pouring through a hole in the dike. Stars like Gidon Kremer, Evgeny Kissin, Vadim Repin and Maxim Vengerov were emigrating. "Do you think anyone in the government - the minister of culture, the ex-party bosses, the new so-called democrats - was upset by this?" Gergiev said to his biographer John Ardoin. "The answer is No, with a capital 'N.' " Gergiev's first priority was supporting gifted young performers and creating an economically viable environment in which they, like him, would want to stay in Russia. One tactic was touring to earn foreign currency. Another was recording. In part because lower pay scales and lack of unions made it less expensive to record in the East, Philips was happy to sign an exclusive recording contract with Gergiev in 1989, enabling him to build the international reputation of his company and garner fees for his players.

The income was less crucial for him personally, since his own career was taking off: after making his foreign debut in Holland in 1987, he appeared over the next few years in leading international houses. Gergiev's rising celebrity helped him raise money abroad, especially to inaugurate in 1993 the annual Stars of the White Nights Festival of opera, ballet and symphonic music, a bracingly audacious initiative in the financial chaos that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union in December 1991.

Although he was still young and unproven, Gergiev had unshakable self-assurance. "You need to know how to say good morning to people - they have to recognize your authority," he said to me. He has made the Mariinsky, in his own image, into the hardest-working orchestra in the world - and, not coincidentally, into the best and best-paid orchestra in Russia. The soprano Anna Netrebko told me, "I remember one night I sang Micaëla" - a leading role in "Carmen" - "then at 11 o'clock in the morning the next day I sang Rosina" - the heroine of "The Barber of Seville." I asked her if she could say no back then. "You can say no, nobody will force you," she replied. "Singers sometimes have to say no." She added with a laugh, "If you say no too many times, that can also be dangerous."

One of Gergiev's first acts as artistic director was to produce a festival in 1989 of Mussorgsky, whose "Boris Godunov," which is generally considered the greatest Russian opera, premiered at the Mariinsky in 1874. "I think it was one of the biggest ideas I had," he told me recently. He performed "Boris" and four other Mussorgsky operas unabridged. Under Communism, the arts were aimed at entertaining and motivating a working-class audience that could not be expected to sit still indefinitely. With his Mussorgsky festival, Gergiev proclaimed that his primary allegiance is to the composer.

Among his many new productions, Gergiev conducted Mariinsky premieres of important works by Prokofiev, Shostakovich and Stravinsky. "The Fiery Angel," which was Prokofiev's first mature opera, is an avant-garde piece that was regarded as a noisy spectacle; Gergiev brought out its Symbolist resonance and supernatural overtones. He presented "Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk," the chilling Shostakovich opera that provoked Stalin's fury and was promptly suppressed. He brought to his theater new stagings of Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring" and "Les Noces," which - even though Stravinsky grew up a few blocks from the Mariinsky, where his father was a leading bass singer - could not be performed in the Soviet Union once the composer emigrated to the West. "To me, Stravinsky or Prokofiev or Shostakovich are gods," he said. "For some bureaucrats they were dangerous Westernized minds. But at the collapse of the Soviet Union, these people no longer had influence. Maybe I took advantage, I don't know."

Russian music is his core repertory, but Gergiev doesn't limit himself. In the Soviet Union, all foreign operas were performed in Russian-language versions; Wagner was hardly heard at all. To build an internationally esteemed company, Gergiev needed to introduce foreign repertory in the original language. His production of "Parsifal" in the 1996-7 season, the first time that Wagner's final opera was performed in the German language in Russia, is one of his signal achievements. In addition, Gergiev has vigorously promoted contemporary music - which is as hard to sell in Russia as it is in the West. He has supported both present-day Russian compositions (notably, the operas and ballets of Rodion Shchedrin) and Western ones (including a residency by the English composer Thomas Adès). Recently, he has also turned more attention to the ballet company, which was the most celebrated corps of the old Kirov and, partly for that reason, has not been revitalized like the opera company. The Mariinsky is the guardian of the flame of classic 19th-century ballet; now it also presents dances by George Balanchine (who danced in his youth at the Kirov) and contemporary choreographers like Alexei Ratmansky and William Forsythe.

In his fervor to find the drama and danger in a piece, Gergiev as a conductor may be less attuned to certain composers. "He doesn't like to conduct bel canto," Netrebko told me. "He is a Shostakovich personality, not a Bellini personality." In other words, he responds to epic power, not delicate trills. Gergiev says that he aims to match his sound to a composer's personality: so that when he plays Shostakovich, he looks for "the right sonority - slightly edgy, not so sweet in the strings - you can be sweet with Tchaikovsky, not with Shostakovich." In both of those composers, however, he brush-strokes strong outlines and then fills in colorful textures. He is a fauvist conductor, bold and vivid. Regardless of the work, he prefers his brass section brilliant, his strings thick and dark - a style more natural to Berlioz or Prokofiev than to, say, Mozart or Haydn.

Even with his affinity for the late Romantics, when he goes outside the Russian repertory, his performances are less reliable. In a cycle of Mahler symphonies with the L.S.O. last season, some London critics found the concerts uneven, with passages taken excessively fast. It was not the Mahler they were used to hearing - which, of course, can be a virtue. "Mahler spent much of his life in Vienna, which is right on the hub of Western Europe and the East," the orchestra chairman and violinist Lennox Mackenzie observed. "To get Mahler as seen from the Eastern side was very interesting. It was more driven. It was more impassioned. I think it was a valid thing to do." Gergiev told me he has recorded all nine Mahler symphonies, so that history can judge.

IN THE UPTURNED WORLD of post-Soviet Russia, restoring the prestige of the Mariin­sky required political as well as musical skills. While Gergiev was pushing his theater forward, the Mariinsky's counterpart in Moscow, the Bolshoi Theater - which had dominated the Russian cultural scene since the Soviets moved the capital to Moscow in 1918 - was sinking into conservative stagnation and factional strife. Toward the end of 1995, a bureaucrat in the administration of President Boris Yeltsin ordered Gergiev to move to the Bolshoi. "I said I couldn't do that, there is a lot for me to do here," Gergiev recounted. "Clearly, Yeltsin was told that the only person who can fix the Bolshoi is Valery Gergiev. I said: 'You don't need to move one man to the Bolshoi. You have to change the way both theaters are supported.' " Gergiev requested and was granted a meeting with the anxious bureaucrat's boss, Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin. Gergiev arrived with Irina Arkhipova, a great singer already advanced in years. Representing the Bolshoi, she had one overriding mission - to obtain financing for the Glinka competition for young singers.

Recalling the meeting, Gergiev emphasized his persuasive bluntness. "The prime minister had 15 minutes, in between Chechnya war meetings," he recalled. "Arkhipova ate 10 minutes talking about the Glinka competition. She wanted $10,000. I saw that the next person was waiting outside the door for his meeting. It was my turn. I said, 'Viktor Stepanovich, if you don't give $10 million now to each theater, both will be lost.' The most upset person was her. She thought she would lose her $10,000. I said, 'You don't know that the salaries are so pitiful that the only ones who can survive are those who work in the West.' He said, 'Where am I supposed to get $10 million?' I said, 'It's the money you spend in one hour in Chechnya.' He said: 'It's nothing to do with Chechnya. Why do you speak of it?' I said: 'The money disappears. It wasn't you who built these opera houses. It is a glory of the nation. You should come see. And maybe first the Bolshoi - they are in even worse shape.' He at some point shockingly realized that I was telling him directly and openly what was going on. We spent one hour extra there. The prime minister immediately gave $10 million together to the two houses. A very Russian story."

The following August, Yeltsin signed an order appointing Gergiev as general director as well as artistic director of the Mariinsky, "because the prime minister reported to him that I was saying the theaters were facing total collapse." Now he was completely in command.

Gergiev had the opportunity to make his case for the expansion of his theater directly to the president in January 1998, when Yeltsin, in a rare cultural outing, attended a Mariinsky performance in Moscow. By this time, the Stars of the White Nights Festival was already established. Gergiev had his eye on the next step, an increase of his theater facilities and the development of the nearby New Holland district, a collection of 18th-century brick warehouses that was used for shipbuilding by Peter the Great. "I brought up three issues," he recalled. Two of them Yeltsin ignored. "I said: 'There are so many old artists - singers, musicians - with small pensions. I hope we can find a way to help them.' No answer. 'And also we want to make a trip for the first time in our history to the regions of Russia on the Volga. Maybe your aides could help us organize it.' No answer. Then, boom, I hit with America." Shrewdly gauging the leader's competitive instincts, Gergiev told Yeltsin that he would need $30 million to start the process of transforming the theater district to match American standards. "I said, 'There are two symbols of cultural might, Kennedy Center and Lincoln Center, that I know well myself.' He looked at me. He never liked really St. Petersburg. He was from Yekaterinburg, and then he had worked in Moscow many years. He said, 'We can do that.' Pride. Because I challenged him."

Once again, thinking big was paying off. "No one talked to him like that because he was scary, like a bear," Gergiev recounted. "I told him that Lincoln Center was concentrated - not one theater here, something else there - and it had a much bigger impact that way. He was the man on the tank. He had to struggle to understand. But he did. And he banged the table hard. The wineglasses shook - he was a big man. He signed the paper." Later a friend of Gergiev's, who was then the deputy minister of finance, telephoned him from Moscow. "He called, laughing. He said: 'What did you say to Yeltsin? He signed it so hard there is a hole in the paper.' "

Yeltsin stunned the nation by resigning on New Year's Eve in 1999 and appointing Vladimir Putin as acting president. It was then that the fortunes of the Mariinsky - and all of St. Petersburg - really took off. Putin was a lifelong resident and partisan of St. Petersburg. Gergiev met him seven years before, when Putin was the deputy to Anatoly Sobchak, the reformist mayor of St. Petersburg and a close ally of Gergiev's. Their relationship has provoked much commentary. There is a frequently published assertion that they are godfathers to each other's children; Gergiev adamantly called that "a lie." He says that they meet only on matters relating to the Mariinsky, but that Putin has been an invaluable friend to both the Mariinsky and St. Petersburg, as president and now as prime minister. President Dmitri Medvedev is also from St. Petersburg - he and Gergiev served together on the board of St. Petersburg State University. Other key national figures were, like Putin, part of the Sobchak circle of liberal reformers in St. Petersburg: notably, Alexei Kudrin, the minister of finance, and German Gref, a younger man, formerly the minister of economic development and trade and now the head of Russia's largest bank. Kudrin and Gref serve as co-chairmen of the Mariinsky Theater.

When he met these politicians in the '90s, Gergiev was the celebrity. "No one knew these people, and I was so famous already," he told me. Once in power, Putin and his associates shaped a Russia that diverged darkly from any youthful liberal visions. Gergiev said that his ongoing relationships with these men are based on shared cultural viewpoints. "It is not personal, this in return for that," he said. "They understand the importance of the Mariinsky."

GERGIEV'S ABILITY TO LEAD MUST have inspired his piano teacher in Vladikavkaz, the North Ossetian city where he grew up, to suggest that he study conducting. She introduced him to Anatoly Briskin, a conductor, who gave him lessons, although Gergiev was more interested in playing soccer. Then everything turned more serious. His father, an officer in the Red Army, died of a stroke when Gergiev was 14. "That was so far the single saddest day of my life, when this happened," he told me. "I suddenly realized my life was completely different." He began playing the piano more. "I didn't feel I wanted to be with a lot of people, maybe," he said. Briskin told him that if he wanted to pursue conducting, the only path was to study in Leningrad with Briskin's own teacher, Ilya Musin, who had a long, legendary career of training young conductors. Gergiev took the advice. From Musin, he imbibed an attitude as well as a technique. "He tried to teach everyone to find a reason for joy in making music," he said. While still a student, Gergiev in 1977 won the Herbert von Karajan conducting prize. Karajan asked Gergiev to come work with him in West Berlin, but the Soviet authorities wouldn't permit it. Instead, he stayed in Leningrad, where he became an assistant conductor at the Kirov.

As a leader, Gergiev's core constituency is his family. His older sister, Larissa, runs the academy for young singers at the Mariinsky, and the husband of his younger sister works at the theater as well. He has installed his mother, along with his two sisters and their families, in apartments in the St. Petersburg waterfront building where he lives with his wife, Natalia Dzebisova - an Ossetian who is 27 years his junior and whom he met when she was a student at the same music school that he attended as a boy, an institution that had been renamed for him by the time she enrolled there. (They have three children.) His devotion in particular to his elderly mother is unstinting. In his three-story pink stucco dacha, large and comfortable but hardly opulent, which he built a year and a half ago in a wooded, suburban district near the Baltic Sea, he included, in addition to her bedroom suite, a glass elevator that allows her to get around easily. But Gergiev's concept of family extends beyond blood ties. When the financier and munificent music patron Alberto Vilar, who had generously supported the Mariinsky, was arrested in 2005 on fraud charges, other opera companies that had benefited from his largess turned their backs on him. Gergiev personally sent him $500,000 to post bail.

Gergiev's loyal relationships with wealthy friends and government officials keep the Mariin­sky afloat. For the past eight years, he has been pushing to build a Mariinsky II opera house, budgeted at about $500 million, to complement the jewel-box auditorium within the pale green, 19th-century Mariinsky Theater. By meeting with Putin and two cabinet ministers, he received approval for the expansion. Afterward, an informal competition in 2001 and a high-profile juried competition in 2003 each selected a cutting-edge foreign architect: first, an American, Eric Owen Moss, and then a Frenchman, Dominique Perrault. Both Moss's iceberg of glass and blue granite and Perrault's glass-and-gold snowflake geometry provoked outraged squawks in conservative St. Petersburg. Both died on the drawing board. Gergiev then resolved to select the architect himself and found one: Jack Diamond, designer of the Toronto opera house, a Modernist glass box that Gergiev says is superbly functional. "Jack Diamond is a practical man," he told me. He sensed the climate wasn't right for a project like Moss's or Perrault's. "Although it looks very good on paper, at a time when people are worried about their jobs and children, you don't go for extravaganza," he said. But he needs top-level authorization to dispense with competitions and start over right away with a new architect.

We were speaking in a hotel cafe in Moscow early last month when an assistant came up and handed him a cellphone. It was Elvira Nabiullina, the minister of economic development and trade, calling to say that she had talked to President Medvedev on his behalf. Gergiev thanked her.

"People are worried," he told me afterward. "Let's be honest, it's a little bit smaller people in the picture, but I know the Canadian will do the job, and I take responsibility. Some people don't want to be blamed. If anything goes wrong, everyone wants to be sure that I will be the one guilty."

WHEN GERGIEV LEADS AN ORCHESTRA , his left hand flutters, as if receiving spectral transmissions, and occasionally, it jerks up to push his thinning, lank gray hair out of his eyes. In his right hand, he sometimes holds a small stick (once I saw him use a toothpick), but more often, nothing. The right hand indicates entrances and tempo, which, even for professional musicians, can be hard to read. Julia Broido, a musicologist at the St. Petersburg conservatory that Gergiev attended, told me that adulatory young conducting students comically imitate the fluttering hand, "but it is a kind of magic, and it only works for Gergiev." The alchemy is not proceeding from the hands. Andrew Marriner, who is the principal clarinetist for the L.S.O., said, "Everything happens here," and traced from the eyes to the mouth. Gergiev's large, protruding eyes beneath bushy arched eyebrows are extraordinarily expressive, and his face registers an emotional range that any actor would envy - from nodding, encouraging confidence to wooing, romantic yearning, from heedless rapture to the darkest scowl. When the pace of the music picks up, his whole body throbs. During a crescendo, he may pump his arms back and forth, as if he were about to dive into a pool, and he will jump up and down a couple of times. He doesn't stand on a box, perhaps because he would fall off and break his neck, or maybe for the same reason that he doesn't wave a big stick: he needs no props to enhance his authority.

Critics who think Gergiev's approach is self-indulgently histrionic may be misled by the gentility of the all-too-typical concert experience today. For example, Gergiev's presentation of "Rite of Spring" is undeniably jolting, but perhaps that is precisely why the first audience of the piece reacted to it with shock. " 'Rite of Spring' premiered in 1913 and over time became a sterile modernist object," Simon Morrison, the author of the recent book "The People's Artist: Prokofiev's Soviet Years," told me. "Stravinsky lived for a long time, and his view of the piece changed. He and his supporters deracinated it. Gergiev has gone back to the original score with a more flexible conducting style. There is a violence and power and dangerousness he put back into it. And when you look at the original conductor's score, it is more in line with the way Gergiev conducts it."

In concert, Gergiev will shape a piece with tempos and balances that bear little resemblance to the ones he dictated in rehearsal - or, if it is a repeat program, to the way he conducted it the previous night. "I remember doing a performance of 'Romeo and Juliet,' which we know backward and forward, and he stopped completely," the L.S.O. double-bass player Matthew Gibson told me. "If you hadn't been paying attention, you would have been lost." Audiences respond to the undercurrent of uncertainty. "In the foyer before a concert, there is a definite, palpable anticipation that something unexpected is going to happen," the L.S.O. chairman Mackenzie observed. "I think he wants you to be on the edge of your seat, absolutely focused." When the musicians are that attentive, the audience will be, too. (The L.S.O. is appearing with Gergiev for the first time in the United States, performing the Prokofiev symphony cycle. Their tour begins March 15 in San Francisco and ends later in the month with four concerts at Lincoln Center in New York.)

GERGIEV WAS IN LONDON in early February, having conducted, on four consecutive nights, the L.S.O. in a Stravinsky-Bartok program and the Mariinsky orchestra in concert versions of three Russian operas. And then, disastrously for a man who is so overscheduled, he woke to find the city lying etherized beneath a once-in-a-generation blanket of snow. Fiddling with his three cellphones, he seemed disquieted by the virtual shutdown of Heathrow Airport. He had 160 people in London, with some scheduled to return home to St. Petersburg and most due to perform the next day in Moscow.

As in an imperial court, there are always people hovering on the sidelines, hoping for a word with Gergiev. Waiting patiently in the hotel lobby was Alexander Zeldin, a director in his early 20s whom Gergiev had tapped to revamp the Mariinsky version of Wagner's four-opera "Ring" cycle before it was committed to DVD. Zeldin's task was to infuse drama into the production of the set designer George Tsypin, which has already toured the world. As Gergiev's representatives telephoned Russian airline executives to locate available seats, Zeldin was able to expatiate on his ideas.

"The most important thing for the 'Rheingold' is to make it exciting," Gergiev said, eating a steak as he waited for news about plane tickets. "To look at the gods - it's like CNN showing when two presidents meet. When the Russian czar or the king of England 800 years ago was receiving people, you could feel it. Now it's a couple of guys and a microphone."

He wanted to discuss video projections for the scenes in "Rheingold" that are set in Alberich's workshop, where the malevolent dwarf, who has treacherously stolen the Ring from the Rhine maidens, oversees a slave labor force.

"There will be children working day and night," Gergiev said. "This has to be powerful with the projections, like 10,000 clones. The public today doesn't react at every image if it is right or beautiful image. The public will only notice if it is frightening. It will be especially frightening if it's children."

In his initial conversations with Tsypin, Gergiev told me, he had emphasized the mythic and nonrational aspects of the story. "I very well remember, I said, 'George, visually we have to get something between Aztec or Peruvian or Chinese or Narts in the Caucasus - something that embraces them all,' " he recounted. "More primitive. Their intellect is" - he put his finger to his nose. "Not," he said, pressing his forehead.

"This" - the nose again - "is also intellect. We kind of succeeded in creating this visual. The lighting succeeded. But it was never focused on any individual action. To make a document, you need more detail."

And more drama. Later, when Zeldin raised the possibility of bringing "the revolution in microbiology" into the production, Gergiev looked at him in an avuncular way. "Don't be too complicated," he said. "The public starts to feel tense. They leave after the first act. The best 'Ring' I saw is not the Met or Bayreuth. It was a cartoon. If it's good for children, it's good for everyone. If they don't believe it, they will turn it off."

During lunch, a Moscow assistant called Gergiev to say he had obtained seats for the two of us on an afternoon flight. "Only Russian pilots are flying," Gergiev told me cheerfully. As the English driver worried silently but visibly about the trip to Heathrow, Gergiev finished lunch at a leisurely pace and went upstairs to complete his methodical packing. As it turned out, we arrived at the unpopulated airport early.

On the plane at last, Gergiev saw to his surprise many empty seats. He began working his cellphones. He learned that some of his company, after missing a flight at another London airport, had arrived at Heathrow. He went up to the cockpit and, in his most persuasive tones, tried to delay the departure so they could board. He was told it was too late: the de-icing was under way. He returned to his seat, knowing that some musicians and singers would be forced to stay overnight in the airport and perform in Moscow the next day with little or no sleep.

As the plane taxied, he continued to scroll through the messages on his new iPhone. His face had crumpled with fatigue, and his mood, a blend of irritation and dejection, was so thick it was palpable. His was not the mien of a conductor whose bassoonist had flubbed a solo; it was more the way Czar Nicholas II might have reacted to the news out of Port Arthur during the Russo-Japanese war. At any moment, Gergiev seems to be completely in that moment. This capability allows him to submerge himself into a piece of music and conduct it as if everything were riding on the performance. It enables him to study next year's schedule, telephone wealthy supporters and conduct press interviews during rehearsal breaks. It gives him an assurance that bolsters his arguments with Russian leaders and inures him from attacks by Western critics. When the engines squealed into liftoff, he shut the phone down and turned to me.

"I am sometimes rightly criticized that I like to do many things," he said. "But believe me, if I had spent three minutes on this, the plane would be full of my people. I always regret when I do not do it myself."

Arthur Lubow is a contributing writer for the magazine. His most recent article was about the facade-engineering-and-design consultancy Front Inc.