Let's talk about Tugan Sokhiev.
The new generation of conductors has it in them to be particularly extraordinary, perhaps more extraordinary than any generation...- I mean this -...than any generation born after 1900, and perhaps particularly the eminent conductors whose life stories center around the former Soviet countries: Kirill Petrenko, Andris Nelsons, Mirga Grazinyte-Tyla, Teodor Currentzis, Vladimir Jurowski, Vasily Petrenko, Jakub Hrusa, Christian Macelaru. These are all talents who have the potential for true greatness - some, like K. Petrenko and Jurowski, are clearly pretty much there already. And of course are other names who could get to the front of the line: Netopil, Urbanszki, Slobedeniouk, Karabits, K. Jarvi. But I'm pretty sure that of these new Eastern Europeans, the one who deserves the most recognition in proportion to how well known he yet is is, without a doubt, Tugan Sokhiev.
Don't get me wrong, he's definitely a name who appears on the calendar of most of the world's major orchestras, but then he disappears. Nelsons is a year younger, and he's already been in Boston for more than six years, Petrenko is suddenly catapulted to Berlin, Deborah Borda is already measuring Jaap's coffin in New York to get Mirga at Lincoln Center, and Currentzis is selling out every venue. But Sokhiev is so good that he easily excels some of the names on that above list, and yet you wouldn't know he was anywhere at all. And in the meantime, he is the music director of the National Orchestra of Toulouse, France's fourth city, the German Symphony Orchestra of Berlin, which is one-third of a three-way tie for Berlin's third-most important orchestra, and the Bolshoi Opera, a job so impossible in post-Soviet Russia that Rozhdestvensky walked away after a single year.
The problem is obvious and all too simple. We are so saturated with his countryman, for like a certain other conductor who is truly great but not quite as great as his starry reputation, because Sokhiev is not Russian, he is Ossetian.
Valery Gergiev is a red supergiant, larger than life, a fact of music who gives performances of a lifetime in one half of a concert and delivers embarrassments in the other half, who appears everywhere, with everyone, all the time, and if he conducted less he would be a better musician. He is, perhaps, a Furtwangler of the Russian repertoire, the giant of the whole thing. Furtwangler, it's forgotten now, could also really suck. But his larger-than-life best speaks for itself, and like Furtwangler before him, Gergiev's performances at his best are out-of-body, legendary experiences that no Soviet or Russian conductor has ever equaled. Not Kondrashin, not Koussevitzky, not Golovanov, not Svetlanov, not Temirkanov, not Rozhvestvensky, not Mravinsky...
But we are all sick of waiting for the best of Gergiev to show up. He has again and again given so many bad performances, he has again and again used his prestige to advance the position of Vladimir Putin's Russia - the most dangerous regime on earth, he has again and again cancelled, shown up late, his ambition taken up so much space in the musical ecology that musicians of better will can take up who are only a hair less exciting. The terribleness of Gergiev is as much part of the mystique as his greatness.
Gergiev is so synonymous with Russian music in the minds of the old classical public that at this point, he IS Russian music. But Gergiev is not even Russian. Many actual Russians like Jurowski and Petrenko are very very careful not to be pigeonholed in Russian music and severely limit how much they conduct it, the same goes for a conductor like Currentzis who works mostly in Russia. But Gergiev and Sokhiev clearly have an outsider's desire for acceptance. I could be wrong, but I don't think Sokhiev ever studied with Gergiev, but even his conducting technique look almost exactly like Gergiev's extremely unorthodox one. They both have a penchant for wayward originality in their interpretations. They both cultivate the same orchestral sonority: bass-heavy, raw brass, deliberately imprecise and weighty in the strings. And they both perform Russian music much more frequently than actual Russian musicians usually do. Seemingly every major young conductor has already recorded the Pathetique. Some of them, like Kirill Petrenko and Currentzis have been praised to the skies. Both of them are quite good in completely different ways, but Sokhiev is better. In ten or twenty years, Sokhiev will have a Pathetique to stand alongside the very best (at least in my opinion): Kondrashin, Fricsay, and yes,... Gergiev.
Perhaps Sokhiev has the same relationship to Gergiev as Eugen Jochum does to Furtwangler. Superficially, Jochum and Furtwangler sounded very much alike and they had a similar podium technique. But the truth is, Jochum was probably the better conductor - his best was nearly as great, and he was reliable in a way Furtwangler never was, and in a much larger repertoire. I don't know yet if that's true about Sokhiev, I think few people who don't live in a city where he appears all the time know the truth yet. But there used to be a superb Mahler 3 from Sokhiev on youtube. Gergiev's Mahler runs the gamut from incredibly exciting to an embarrassment, but he never exhibited the perception into Mahler's soundworld Sokhiev did there. If you watch Sokhiev conduct, knowledgeable listeners will notice the similarities to Gergiev immediately, but Sokhiev - while at times employing tempi daringly extreme, has little of Gergiev's actual recklessness, and supports the orchestra with as much information as he can possibly give to help them in a way Gergiev does not. Gergiev is a great conductor by the force of his personality, Sokhiev is a great conductor.
Sokhiev may have half-a-century still to make his mark. His time has not come, but it most definitely will. His star may have to wait to rise to its true altitude until Gergiev's star truly falls, but there is no doubt in my mind that he will be in the pantheon. He may not be Gergiev, but Gergiev, like Furtwangler, can continue to be worshipped by the cultists, Sokhiev will be listened to by music lovers.
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