4.30 am. Encounter with Gergiev

Outside it’s snowing in the pale and spectral city of St Petersburg. Inside it’s 4.30 am and we’ve been drinking for several hours in a restaurant next to the Mariinsky Theatre when Valery Gergiev, for many the world’s greatest conductor and with a reputation as a wild man, suggests now would be the best time for an interview with him.

(If you are Gergiev you don’t get thrown out of restaurants there – he even gets his own motorcade if he needs to get about the city in a hurry).

As a website called Opera Chic put it, “he can make the Pastorale sound like John Williams and Richard Strauss sound like Def Leppard, he nevertheless can make magic things happen whenever he is on.”

I’ve been pacing myself – about one in four drinks compared to the assembled Russians – but I’m still somewhat tanked up or whatever the Russian equivalent is – baboushkaed? glasnossed? Many is the journalist who has followed Gergiev round the world on the promise of an interview only to find it didn’t happen, so although an interview was scheduled for the next day, I’m not about to say no. The evening started with the premiere of Gergiev’s new version of Rimsky-Korsakov’s rarely performed Tsar’s Bride, part of his attempts to raise the profile of Russian composers. The opera was followed by a Gala Dinner attended by music-lovers, many of whom have flown in for the event such as the conductor Emmanuel Haim, who is sitting next to me.

Also at our table, if all too briefly, is the hottest soprano in the world, the gorgeous Anna Netrebko, who used, famously, to be a cleaner at least for a while at the Mariinsky Theatre before Gergiev discovered her (as he has many others, such as the great mezzo Olga Borodina), and who seems to be rather underdressed for the occasion (“Is that a tart?” said a boor at my table after she left, not recognising that she was the star of the show we’ve just seen). He was part of a gang (a slick?) of oil barons and other sponsors at my table. Someone offers me a lift home. I decline, saying my hotel is just round the corner. He says he meant back to London in his private jet. The designer of the Opera we’ve just seen has proposed numerous toasts to the genius of Gergiev, before slipping unceremoniously under the table.

Gergiev looks like a man who hasn’t had a decent night’s sleep in several decades, which may in fact be true. He often puts in 20 hour days and seems to expect those around him to do likewise. He reminds me a bit of Jack Nicholson, and several attractive women at the dinner talk swooningly about him to me, whilst remaining strangely unmoved by my own erotic charisma. People talk about his “demonic energy” – he runs a company that includes 80 singers, 200 dancers, 180 musicians and scores of technical and administrative staff. Nothing happens at the Mariinsky without Gergiev’s say-so.

Talking about Gergiev to the composer Thomas Adès, we decide his energy is something to with avoidance of his own mortality. “You can sense a flutter of black wings,” says Adès, who has talked to Gergiev about presenting a new opera at the Mariinsky. I suggested he do a version of The Master And The Margarita, the wonderful Bulgakov novel.

Gergiev was principal conductor at the Rotterdam Philharmonic, and is currently the principal conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra – a season begins this week at the Barbican. He guest-conducts numerous other orchestras (once he did three different ones in different countries on the same day) including at the Metropolitan Opera in New York where they invented a post of “principal guest conductor” especially for him.  He runs numerous festivals, including the elaborate White Nights Festival in St Petersburg every summer, and I lost count, after about 20, of the recordings he’s made. He somehow finds time for things like a benefit concert for the victims of the Beslan tragedy. This is someone who according to his sister Larissa “cannot cook, wash his clothes or do any kind of practical housework”.

Several of the toasts had been about his home in Ossetia, in the Caucasus, and I ask him if he still feels an outsider. “This is a glass of red wine," he says (we seem to have moved to wine) with an accent that seems to load each word with a certain intensity and he fixes me with his glittering eyes. “You have a certain problem to make it look like a glass of white wine. That is more or less the explanation.”

So what characteristics does he have from the Caucasus? “It is different from Moscow. Or Iraq. You should read our warrior epics."  Does he see himself as a kind of warrior? “Sometimes we have to fight, to struggle. We quite successfully went through it. Maybe we are the winners…” As he says about conducting, “Anyone can wave their hand, you need a mid-sized, big or short stick, or you can do without. You have to be musical, you have to be technically equipped, but by far the most important is leadership, which matters nearly everything."

A great achievement of Gergiev’s has been to guide the Mariinsky through the immensely difficult change from the Soviet times, when the State heavily supported the company. He even charmed the seemingly charmless Vladimir Putin. The Moscow-based Bolshoi, equally as famous as the Mariinsky, has by general consensus failed to make he same transition. He’s often compared to Diaghilev, the extraordinary Russian impresario of the early 20th century. “Let’s forget about that. It’s important for me to recognise I don’t have friends like the young Prokofiev or Stravinsky or Ravel. I do not have artists of this calibre who are my direct partners. But the Mariinsky will be as big as it was during the Diaghilev era."

A book came out called Phantom of the Opera in the City of N by Kirill Shevshenko, the journalist husband of Elena Prokina, a disaffected former Mariinsky singer, which chronicles the exploits of Abdullah (Gergiev’s nickname at the theatre), the dictatorial head of the N’sky Theatre. The descriptions of the despotic control-freak Abdullah are, according to those I asked in St Petersburg, fairly true to life, especially his chaotic behaviour and his working the orchestra for hours on end. In the novel the musicians are not even allowed a toilet break. “Everyone got their diapers on?” is a phrase at the beginning of rehearsals. Gergiev tells me he hasn’t read the book and when I ask him about his demonic image he just says, “I don’t buy this kind of reputation”, although he does say this phrase in a rather diabolic way.

But the musicians put up with him not just because he’s kept their jobs – the acid test has to be the music. If I had to pick the best opera I’ve ever seen, it would be his production of Prokofiev’s War and Peace, at the Met in New York a couple of years ago, which was enthralling from start to finish. Singers included Anna Netrebko and Dmitri Hvorostovsky, a Siberian-born friend of Gergiev who has Elvis-like star-wattage. Gergiev coaxed, often with an expression of painful anguish, the best from the Orchestra, his whole body shuddering at times with the music. The best Mahler symphony I’ve seen was conducted by Gergiev. For this you can forgive almost everything.

Sometimes the wheels do come off, though. A year after the opera company was hailed “the best opera company in the world” in London in 2000, he came back the year later with a Verdi season that had a lunatic schedule (five operas in two weeks) that was roundly slammed by the critics. The opening night of Un Ballo In Maschera was described as a “fiasco” and  “a balls-up in mascara” by the Times. When I ask him about this, he says, “Even Manchester United lose sometimes.”

At the age of 50 (he’s now 57), he suddenly got married to an unknown 19-year-old musician and they have three children. Has domestic life slowed him down? “No, I don’t think so.” This seems to prompt a thought that although it’s gone five in the morning there are a couple of other people he needs to talk to and he gets out his mobile phone and starts calling. The conversation, lasting about 15 minutes, is over. It could have been worse – the guy from the Times got a few minutes in his limo to the airport the next day, with Gergiev on his phone the entire time.

The next morning I stagger out of bed at 10 and wander over to see Gergiev already in dynamic full flow, conducting Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde. I remind myself that I’ve never been too keen on Wagner, but the music is so intense, megalomaniacal, heavy metal and at the same time poetic and beautiful I’m going to have to have a re-think.

Valery Gergiev and the London Symphony Orchestra begin a 10-concert season at the Barbican on 20 September.