Gergiev on Tour: Moscow and Eastern Russia
In April, 2007, Gergiev brought the Mariinsky Orchestra to Moscow. Every year since 2002, he had taken the orchestra from its home base in St. Petersburg to Russia’s capital, and from there to a different set of eastern Russian cities, traveling in some years as far as Siberia. This performance would be the first in an annual tour that Gergiev called his Moscow Easter Festival.
Because the orchestra performs in so many cities, each location can receive a visit only every four or five years; this makes each concert a special event for the local population. Gergiev is very dedicated to these audiences, and keeps the orchestra playing at its best. He often gives the city two concerts on the same day—one in the afternoon and another, for a different audience, a short time later. His programs include Russian favorites as well as important works from the classic German and French repertoire. In a concert in Nizhny Novgorod, the orchestra performed Debussy’s “Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun,” Stravinsky’s “Symphony in C,” and Rimsky Korsakov’s “Suite from Scheherazade.” The second program consisted of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, a particularly difficult work lasting over seventy minutes. I can’t imagine any western musicians’ union permitting a schedule of two such demanding concerts in a single day, with only a short interval of rest for the orchestra. Yet Gergiev and his musicians played every concert on the tour with full energy and concentration.
A couple of days before the Moscow concert that inaugurated the tour, the producer, Margie Smilow, and I spent a couple of days scouting sites that would convey the atmosphere of the city for our film. When we turned into Red Square, I was not prepared for the shock of recognition: St. Basil’s striped cathedral, and the Kremlin presiding over the huge open square that still serves as a military parade ground. Looking across to the reviewing stand on the wall above Lenin’s tomb, I imagined I could still see Stalin and Molotov, or Brezhnev and Gromyko, scowling in the old newsreels.
On Easter Sunday, at Gergiev’s suggestion, we took our crew to the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, with its three golden onion domes gleaming alongside the Moscow River. As we arrived, the cathedral’s high-pitched bells and deep-throated gongs were just announcing the noonday service. The original cathedral had been compleed in 1861 to commemorate Napoleon’s defeat. In 1931 Stalin ordered it to be destroyed, to make way for a new Supreme Soviet meeting hall. Soon after the Communist regime fell, the Cathedral was rebuilt on the same site and was dedicated in 2000.
Ten minutes after our arrival, we asked the church officials for permission to send a crew up into the bell tower. They surprised us by immediately agreeing, though we had no special credentials. Our camera- and soundman strapped on their equipment and began the long climb up the interior stone stairway as the congregation was filing in far below. From a corner in the belfry they got some dramatic shots of the bells and the three young bell ringers, pulling their ropes and banging their hammers.
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We set out to meet Gergiev at a downtown hotel on Tverskaya Ulitsa, Moscow’s main thoroughfare, and found him at a meeting with a group of businessmen. Gergiev is very good at maintaining contact with influential people in Russia, even with President Vladimir Putin. This helps him extend his fund raising network for the Mariinsky Theater. Gergiev was so well thought of by the powers that be in Moscow. He had been invited to become the director of the Bolshoi Theater. He declined, saying that he would never leave the Mariinsky for the Bolshoi, and to be in charge of both would probably kill him. After more friendly banter, the meeting adjourned to the hotel's rooftop cafel, with a view of Red Square directly over the railing.
A few days later, as the rehearsal began for the first Moscow concert, Gergiev had much to accomplish in a limited amount of time. He was under pressure, and the musicians felt it. Suddenly, in the middle of Stravinsky’s “Petrouchka,” he stopped the musicians and spoke angrily to them. “I know we’ve played this piece many times,” he told them. “But there’s no excuse for lackadaisical playing. We must rehearse as though we were performing.” No one moved. Gergiev seemed to look each musician in the eye. Then he started again. For the rest of the rehearsal, the sound was extra crisp and expressive.
The concert that evening was introduced by Yury Luzhkov, the mayor of Moscow. An old friend of Gergiev’s, Luzhkov had helped him raise money for a new concert hall in St. Petersburg. He spoke effusively about the maestro’s great talent as a conductor and his dedication to Russian musical life. The mayor was followed by the Minister of Culture, who said the same thing. Then Patriarch Alexy II, the Primate of the Orthodox Russian Church, strode ceremoniously onstage and offered his blessing, ending with a call and response in which the entire audience participated. Apparently they had not forgotten the text during the long Communist hiatus.
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Usually, to film a symphony orchestra, and provide the necessary coverage of the conductor and all the instruments, you need anywhere from five to ten cameras, and many microphone locations. But such a crew would be much too cumbersome when you're trying to keep up with an orchestra on tour. For flexibility—and for obvious budgetary reasons—our crew consisted of one cameraman and one soundman.
On arriving at a new location, the stagehands—regulars from the Mariinsky Theater, who always travel with the group—immediately set up for rehearsal. The film crew has to work quickly to find a position for the camera on stage: once the music starts, there’s no opportunity to find a new location. Our soundman, Gergely Hornos, found an ingenious way to use only one multi-directional microphone, which he set up on the floor in front of the orchestra—a location that made the orchestra sound full and well balanced. The camera usually ended up on one side of the stage for the first half of a rehearsal or concert, and on the other side for the second half. But from neither position could visual interest be sustained for very long.
To solve the problem of providing visual interest with only one camera, I decided to make “a stepping stone out of a stumbling block,” as Albert Schweitzer once said. (He was referring to the way Bach devised endings to his fugues that were all the more brilliant because they unified the individual voices that he had made independent of one another.) I decided to make a montage out of the tour and concert shots. I would begin with a short episode from the first concert, sustain it as long as possible, then cut to a traveling shot of the orchestra on the train, to shots of the next eastern city, and then to the next concert.
In Moscow I started with about a minute of the “Petrouchka” performance. Then I cut away to a shot of the countryside from the train window to indicate that the tour was under-way. Then a shot of the train pulling into the station at Nizhny Novgorod, 250 miles from Moscow. After a series of shots of the cold, snowy city, and a look at Gergiev and the orchestra performing Rimsky Korsakov’s “Scheherazade,” I cut to the musicians in the frozen dark, boarding the train to Ulyanovsk.
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Three of our filmmaking team were with me on the tour—the cameraman, the soundman, and the production manager, Sergei Beck. Sergei and I shared a sleeping compartment in which the two daytime benches, covered with a sheet and a blanket, served as beds. Some of the compartments had four beds, with upper and lower berths opposite each other. In both arrangements, the violinists and wind players were crowded in with their instruments and luggage; the larger instruments were packed in a baggage car along with cases full of orchestral parts. There was a bathroom at the end of each car, and a room for a watchful attendant who made tea in the morning.
Early the next day, as the train began to slow down for our arrival in Ulyanovsk, the crew filmed the musicians dozing in their compartments, or quietly talking, or just staring out the window. They never spoiled our filming by looking up at the camera or smiling at us; they acted as though we weren’t there. When we followed a trumpet player through several cars to the baggage room, he, too, completely ignored us, even when we had trouble squeezing the camera through the doors. We silently thanked him for not offering to help.
In Ulyanovsk, the birthplace of Lenin, we filmed exteriors in the city while the musicians rested before the evening concert. Outside Lenin’s house, we came upon a group of protesters with red banners and balloons chanting for better schools. Apparently such political activism was no longer dangerous in central Russia. We found a late-afternoon view of the Volga River, and from there cut to a concert shot of Gergiev conducting Rimsky’s “Easter Overture.”
As in Moscow, before any of the tour concerts began, there were speeches and presentations onstage in which Gergiev would accept a token of the community’s appreciation for his visit—a commemorative plaque, a silver cup, or a sample of local craftwork. With the town officials smiling proudly, Gergiev would make a warm speech of thanks.
After the Ulyanovsk concert, a crowd of well wishers, mostly young students, clamored for his autograph. He asked them what instrument they were studying. (It was amusing to see some of them videotaping their conversations with him on their phones.) During the official dinner that followed, Gergiev finally allowed himself to relax and enjoy a few drinks.
When we returned to the train, we found Gergiev in a compartment with several orchestra members, joking and laughing. Later one of the musicians told me he had seldom seen this kind of easy camaraderie between Gergiev and the musicians. But when we joined a group of wind players in the dining car, and Gergiev and the musicians swapped funny stories, the cordial atmosphere seemed comletely natural.
Our filming ended in Samara, where the Volga becomes the widest river in the world; boats on the far shore are practically invisible. Samara was the alternate capital of Russia during World War II, complete with an emergency bunker for Stalin. After the war, it became a center of the aerospace industry, and in half-empty lots amid fading advertising billboards there are still models of three-story rockets ready for takeoff.
At the Samara concert that evening, the whole program consisted of a performance of Act I from Wagner’s “Siegfried,” sung in the original German, and lasting well over an hour. The orchestra was back onstage barely an hour later for a second concert, this time with a performance of Mahler’s tumultuous Fifth Symphony. The Samara audiences listened to both of these programs in concentrated silence.
The music was still ringing in my ears the next morning as the film crew and I waited at the airport for the plane back to Moscow. There was still another concert on the tour—in Ufa, 260 miles farther east from Samara, but we were not scheduled to film there. We arranged to meet up with Gergiev when he arrived back in Moscow the next day. There was to be a final performance in the famed Tchaikovsky Hall, and since this concert was also outside our shooting plan, we looked forward to the rare treat of hearing the orchestra perform without the task of filming it.
Tchaikovsky Hall
Unfortunately, when we arrived at the hall before the concert, we found Gergiev and the musicians standing around waiting; the music stands and heavy instruments had not yet been delivered from Ufa. The train that was to carry them had stalled, and a replacement train did not have enough room for everything. A van was hired to carry the remaining instruments, but it had been held up in heavy traffic. During the delay, a Moscow television station had plenty of time to complete an elaborate multi-camera setup in preparation for a special live transmission of the concert. To offset the musicians’ black and white formal clothes, the TV producers decorated the stage and the music stands with garlands of lights tinted in blue and rose. It looked like a Christmas window at Saks Fifth Avenue.
When the instruments finally arrived, the stagehands set up the chairs and music stands in record time. The musicians had only a few minutes to go over some of the difficult passages with Gergiev before the audience was admitted to the hall; the concert was now an hour late. In spite of all these delays and a frantic last-minute mini-rehearsal, the orchestra’s playing was superb. I found myself applauding at the end as enthusiastically as anyone in the hall.
The next day we began to plan our June visit to Ossetia, Gergiev’s birthplace in the foothills of the Caucasus mountains.
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NEXT -
V. St. Petersburg, Ossetia (The Caucasus), and back to St. Petersburg
PROGRAMS OF THE MARIINSKY ORCHESTRA’S PARTICIPATION
IN THE MOSCOW EASTER FESTIVAL 2007
8th APRIL, 19.00, Sunday — Moscow, Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatoire
Tchaikovsky
Violin Concerto—Soloist: Leonidas Kavakos, violin
Stravinsky
‘Petrushka’
9th APRIL, 18.00, Monday — Nizhniy Novgorod, Kremlin Concert Hall
Debussy
Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune
Stravinsky
Symphony in C
Rimsky-Korsakov
‘Scheherazade’
9th APRIL, 20.30, Monday — Nizhniy Novgorod, Kremlin Concert Hall
Mahler
Symphony No. 5
10th APRIL, 19.00, Tuesday — Ulyanovsk, Culture and Concert Center of Lenin Memorial
Rimsky-Korsakov
Russian Easter Festival Overture
Debussy
Nocturnes (I, II)
‘Le Martyre de Saint Sébastien’
Rimsky-Korsakov
‘Scheherazade’
11th APRIL, 18.00, Wednesday — Samara, Concert Hall of the Samara State Philharmonic Society
Wagner
Siegfried, I act (concert)
11th APRIL, 20.30, Wednesday — Samara, Concert Hall of the Samara State Philharmonic Society
Rimsky-Korsakov
Russian Easter Festival Overture
Borodin
Symphony No. 2
Stravinsky
‘The Firebird’
12th APRIL, 18.00, Thursday — Ufa, Bashkir State Opera and Ballet Theatre
Wagner
‘Die Walkürie’, III act (concert)
12th APRIL, 20.30, Thursday — Ufa, Bashkir State Opera and Ballet Theatre
Rimsky-Korsakov
Russian Easter Festival Overture
Stravinsky
‘Jeu de cartes’
Stravinsky
Symphony in Three Movements
Ravel
Bolero
13th APRIL, 19.00, Friday — Moscow, Tchaikovsky Concert Hall
Debussy
Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune
Stravinsky
Symphony in Three Movements
Stravinsky
Symphony in C
Debussy
‘La Mer’
14th APRIL, 15.00, Saturday — Moscow, Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatoire
Beethoven
Piano Concerto No. 4
Soloist: Alexei Volodin, piano
Mahler
Symphony No. 5
23rd APRIL, 19.00, Monday — Moscow, Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatoire
Stravinsky
Cantata ‘The King of the Stars’
Debussy
‘Le Martyre de Saint Sébastien’
Stravinsky
‘Oedipus Rex’
24th APRIL, 19.00, Tuesday — St. Petersburg, Mariinsky Concert Hall
Mahler
Symphony No. 4
8th MAY, 19.00, Tuesday — Moscow, Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko Musical Theatre
Prokofiev
‘Love for Three Oranges’ (staged)
9th MAY, 13.00, Wednesday — Moscow, Poklonnaya Gora
Gala Concert for the Victory Day
9th MAY, 19.00, Wednesday — Moscow, Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatoire
Stravinsky
‘Les Noces’
Symphony of Wind Instruments
‘The Rite of Spring’