Behind the scenes at the Kirov Opera

THE current Kirov Opera and Ballet Season at Covent Garden is a rare treat. It provides the possibility to experience excellence under circumstances that would defeat any other company.

The difficulty of maintaining standards while touring is legendary; and yet for the Kirov, like all the opera companies of the former Soviet Union, foreign touring is a permanent necessity to keep the whole enterprise afloat.

Such companies must acknowledge that their governments have other priorities.

The subsidies are there, but inflation cruelly reduces them and they are frequently paid months late. There are many stories of opera companies' financial directors taking the train to Moscow, pleading at the ministry and returning (if lucky) with a suitcase crammed full of notes.

But touring can provide hard currencies. In this, the Kirov is no different from the opera companies of Odessa, Latvia or Kiev. In almost every other way, the company is unique.

Firstly, the Kirov is a throwback to a former era. Apart from changing the name of the company and its St Petersburg theatre from Mariinsky to Kirov in the 1930s - after a Soviet politician who had no real connection with opera or ballet - it survived the huge upheavals of the 20th century unscathed. It has now changed the name of the theatre, although not yet the company, back to Mariinsky. The Kirov still has the largest ensemble of singers in the world (more than 80) and a huge staff to assist them. Each singer is appointed to a particular pianist who sits in on rehearsals, taking notes for "their" artists and making disparaging remarks about the other singers.

There are also a number of women who look after the singers and lead them from their dressingrooms to the stage. Many of them are ex- dancers (in a country where inflation wipes out pensions, some are of a very great age) and their knowledge about opera and singing is legendary. It has ateliers where scene painters still work in ways forgotten elsewhere.

This partly explains the predilection of the company for painted sets, which are, of course, also easier to take on tour.

The most remarkable thing about the ensemble is its quality. Singers such as Olga Borodina, Vassily Gerello, Nikolai Putilin and Larissa Diadkova, all of whom can command the highest fees in the West, are proud to return to the St Petersburg ensemble to perform for honour rather than money.

While this is partly due to loyalty and patriotism, it owes far more to the extraordinary hypnotic power which the Kirov's artistic director and chief conductor Valery Gergiev holds over his artists.

ONE of the most remarkable musicians alive today, he demands of his singers no more than he does of himself.

With posts all over the world (including New York and Rotterdam) and a career that takes him everywhere else, frequently working in two countries on the same day, Gergiev nevertheless finds the time to direct. He was appointed artistic director of the opera company in 1988 when only 35. He was not even a Communist Party member; the Kirov enjoyed relative autonomy. Since then, Gergiev has ruled the company with a baton of iron from his remarkable office. Tchaikovsky sat at the same desk in the same office, and still peers down from a sketch on the walls. Outside, a staircase carpeted in red leads to the door.

Night and day, in a manner reminiscent of Versailles, the staircase throngs with petitioners and people hoping for an appointment.

Gergiev has a superhuman capacity for work and a superhuman disregard for needs such as sleep. A meeting with him about the costumes for The Marriage of Figaro that I was due to have at 4pm one afternoon got moved to the first interval of the opera he was conducting that night (Sadko), then to the second and then to after the performance. Finally, I was woken at 3.30am.

After the meeting, he went home to bed - but was back in the theatre at 8.30am for orchestra rehearsals.

The word "workaholic" might have been invented for Gergiev. It is said that he once met an English conductor who had just announced a six-month sabbatical. To Gergiev's bemused questioning of what that meant, he was advised to take an afternoon off to see how he liked it. How could he?

He had a concert in London with several days of rehearsals beforehand and, at the same time, a concert in Vienna, a rehearsal in Rotterdam and numerous meetings. Incidentally, the Kirov's season at Covent Garden coincides with the Kirov White Nights Festival in St Petersburg - especially big this year to celebrate the millennium.

If Gergiev does not rehearse as intensely as other conductors it is because he does not always need to.

When he took over my production of The Marriage of Figaro for his own festival, the Mikkeli in Finland, he did not rehearse at all. Musically, the premiere was one of the most exciting Mozart performances I have ever heard.

But the acting went out of the window. The terrified singers stared at him throughout like hypnotised rabbits - for which Gergiev seemed to blame me.

But who cared when the result was so exciting?

How does he get away with it? First, by having a baton technique unparalleled for clarity and expressivity, second by possessing the most terrifyingly hypnotic eyes in the business and third by his innate sense of the excitement of music.

The Kirov's operatic fare at Covent Garden (Mazeppa, Khovanschina, War and Peace, Semyon Kotko) may be relatively unknown, but Gergiev will certainly make it thrilling.

The Kirov Opera at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden will run until 15 July. Box office: 020 7304 4000.

Copyright 2000
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