LSO
Peter Culshaw
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 Read more ...