So now that we in the West won't see Gergiev again until he's at least 80, I suppose it's a good time to appraise certain things about him.
Take this performance, for example. If I'm being honest with myself, this is the best performance I've ever heard of Pictures at an Exhibition, and frankly, it's not even close. There have been plenty of great performances: Koussevitzky, Toscanini, Solti, Giulini, Kubelik, Muti, Markevitch, Svetlanov, Abbado, Dorati, Jansons, and not least our own maestro hero here, Theodore Kuchar etc. etc. etc. This Gergiev performance is better, by some margin. It marries the Mussorgskian Russianness to the French color, and has the Mussorgskian grandeur and the Ravelian weirdness. It is, quite simply, a sui generis miracle of a performance.
Gergiev is just a larger than life fact of music. His career has unprecedented highs and lows and no middle. So often, a Gergiev performance is either a revelation or so awful that you wonder how he's ever hired back. If he conducted one-third of the performances he does and focus every performance on the best possible effort, he might be regarded as the world's greatest by some margin. But then again, he wouldn't be Gergiev, he clearly thrives on spontaneous combustion. Every moment in his performances is like interpretive ADHD, in which he finds a new angle mid-performance and pursues it. If it works, it works brilliantly, if it doesn't, it's truly abysmal. It's easy now to remember him for his awful concerts, but if people say that there were never moments when they were inspired by Gergiev, I can't quite believe them. At his relatively frequent best, he was so raw, so visceral, so overwhelming.
He's as much a 'musical fact' of our time as Bernstein was in the era before him. But Bernstein, for all his erraticness, was a genius whose animal instinct for music was matched by his overwhelming knowledge. Gergiev has no such intellect, he is pure instinct, and his instinct only works in Eastern European music.
The criticism is almost immaterial, because music in our time is so shaped by his presence that it changed the curvature of our perceptions. Without Gergiev, few of us would know the great Russian operas of Rimsky-Korsakov and Prokofiev, and if we were lucky enough to hear older maestri like Svetlanov and Temirkanov, might have occasionally heard the spontaneous Russian performance style that carries the 19th century 100 years later. But Gergiev showed many of us that the old romantic, instinctive spontenaeity of Mengelberg and (so we read) Nikisch was still possible 100 years later.
But like Mengelberg, there is something almost hollow sounding about his performances. It's pure exhibitionism, and however exciting, there is a kind of soullessness that eliminates introspection any potential for dullness. Compare Gergiev to other great post-Soviet bloc conductors: Jansons, Bychkov, Ivan Fischer, our own Andrey Boreyko. Gergiev is an awesome experience, but when is the heart moved? Gergiev accelerates the pulse, but the other four, much more patient and restrained, can leave you in tears.
Gergiev's opera conducting is so exciting, and yet like other superstars before him, the trail of voices he may have blown out by overplaying the orchestra is a kind of musical crime. Find that interview by Galina Gorchakova, the accusations she leaves at his feet are kind of shocking. The lack of care he exhibited for his singers is scandalous, they were all just appendages for Gergiev Inc. to be disgarded once he blew through their vocal capabilities. Like recent Russian ice skaters, their careers were practically over before they began, and he seemingly used up their voices thirty years before their careers should be over.
But Gergiev's ambition can in some ways be sympathized with. This most conspicuously Russian conductor is not Russian at all, he's Ossetian, a minority within the Georgian minority that to a certain extent depended on Russia from protection from the Georgians. Whereas more obviously probing Russian conductors like Rozhdestvensky and Jurowski are sons of great conductors themselves, Gergiev comes from a military family. He had no musical biltung and could only pursue music from the engine of his own talent.
Gergiev is pure musical id, and his career is the result of an engine that knows no rest and plows ahead through every obstacle. It might take ten years, but if he makes it to 80, he will be back West, and play on through every protest and controversy. While he is gone, as hard as as it seems, he will be missed. Not too much, but a little. The era of Gergiev is over for us, and now we get a decade to unpack it and wonder: 'OK, what the hell was that?'
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