Audience wait for an hour while Gergiev takes a comfort break
NewsThe Russian premiere of Modest Mussorgsky’s opera Salambo was suspended for an hour while its conductor Valery Gergiev popped out to attend to other duties across town.
Inexplicable,and unprofessional.
UPDATE: Maestros behaving badly
Here’s what the Telegram channel reports:
Valery Gergiev left one of the premiere performances at the Bolshoi Theater to conduct a performance of a song based on the poems of Maria Zakharova. According to the audience, the intermission lasted almost an hour due to the maestro’s absence.
The Telegram channel “Passion for Theaters” wrote about the prolonged break in the performance of Modest Mussorgsky’s opera “Salambo”, which had never been staged in Russia before. According to the author of the message, the audience was not warned that the intermission would last longer than usual.
While theatergoers at the Bolshoi were waiting for the performance to continue, Gergiev managed to go to the VTB Arena. There, he led the orchestra in performing the patriotic song “Return the Memory” based on the poems of the official representative of the Russian Foreign Ministry. In addition, the conductor managed to receive the Golden Gramophone award and present a certificate for 1 million rubles to the family of a deceased member of the “SVO” from Ossetia.
Валерий Гергиев отлучился с одного из премьерных спектаклей в Большом театре, чтобы дирижировать исполнением песни на стихи Марии Захаровой. По словам зрителей, из-за отсутствия маэстро антракт длился почти час.
О затянувшемся перерыве в исполнении ранее не ставившейся в России оперы Модеста Мусоргского «Саламбо» написал телеграм-канал «Страсти по театрам». По словам автора сообщения, публику не сочли нужным предупредить о том, что антракт продлится дольше обычного.
Пока театралы в Большом ждали продолжения спектакля, Гергиев успел съездить в «ВТБ Арену». Там он выступил во главе оркестра, исполнившего патриотическую песню «Верните память» на стихи официального представителя МИД России. Кроме того, дирижёр успел получить награду «Золотой Граммофон» и вручить сертификат на 1 миллион рублей семье погибшего участника «СВО» из Осетии.
Typically Russian sense of rudeness and entitlement, along with all of this war criminal’s multitude of other defects
Oh give me a break, why don’t you take your xenophobic nonsense elsewhere. This has nothing to do with “Russianness” or any other cold war stereotypes you may have knocking around in your empty skull.
I agree with that. He’s just an total boor.
You’re entirely correct. It’s nationally and culturally neutral ass-hattery.
Totally agree
Putin’s style, I am afraid. Plus some Georgian brandy.
I don’t like this trend of males going collarless/sleeveless on stage. It is so disrespectful towards the orchestra and audience, and looks absolutely grotesque.
Dress properly! Come on, now!
Say what you like about John Eliot, but at least he knows white tie when sees it. Sheesh!
Absolutely!
Speaking as someone who has to do a lot of their playing in white tie and tails I say ‘Bring it on!’
Bloody uncomfortable, draughty and useless anywhere else.
Open neck black shirt, jacket if chilly…perfect!
That’s what happens when Putin owns you, You are at his service 24/7. And for that how much did the public pay for a ticket? America get ready. That’s what Trump-owned businesses, politicians, etc. will be expected to do for America’s 1st Dictator. So sad and disconcerting.
It is so sad that you can’t read or hear anything without interjecting a TDS filled rant. Seek mental health because it’s going to be a very long four years for you. You may not survive depending on how severe your TDS is. Good luck.
You’re right that it’s going to be a very long four years.
I thought comments on this site were supposed to be filtered for gratuitous personal abuse.
Clearly the SlippedDisc subeditor house elves are slipping themselves.
This is a thoroughly shameful comment with absolutely nothing to do with Valery Gergiev and should have been removed.
Jonathan Sutherland: You were not born in Australia by some chance?
Yes. Email contact?
Nonsense! (In every sense…)
At the headline “Comfort Break,” I imagined this might just be a problem of not enough fiber.
At the headline “Comfort berak” I thought this might be similar to the long intervals at some Furtwängler concerts, when a young lady would be assisting him in adjusting his shirt.
He can do what he likes being a VP henchman
Different reason, but I’ve attended several Gergiev performances with hour-long intermissions (including for Die Walkure; made for a long night). One reason to be grateful to American unions – they won’t stand for that.
A conductor sneaking in an extra gig midway through another work he’s performing just has to be a first, right ?
Yess!! This lol
So what’s new? I was in St. Petersburg some years ago and attended a Gergiev concert. The programme consisted of one of the shorter Bruckner symphonies and nothing else. The concert began half an hour late, as the maestro didn’t turn up until then. With the audience seated on time, the orchestra drifted onto the platform in small groups until Gergiev decided to grace us with his presence. I spoke to a Russian seated next to me who said that was the usual procedure at Gergiev concerts. No one was ever sure at what time the performance would begin.
I’m reminded of the time Joe Volpe forbade Gergiev from entering the pit late at a final dress rehearsal for Parsifal. Mr. G. came running in 20 minutes late and Joe was waiting for him at the orchestra pit door to stop him from entering. Joe did have cajones. No nonsense, even from the likes of Pavarotti and Battle.
To Tiredofitall,
Maybe you mean cOjones, not cAjones (drawers)?
The only thing I find surprising here is that Gergiev was actually in St. Petersburg. He always seemed to be in two other places (several time zones apart).
I also recall a performance of Parsifal conducted by Gergiev at the Wiener Staatsoper several years ago.
It started 20 minutes late because the egomaniacal maestro was lingering over a late lunch at the upmarket Plachutta eatery. Intendant Dominique Meyer was pacing up and down outside the
Bühnentür in a state of apoplexy trying to reach Valery Abisalovich on his mobile phone.
Finally the baton-wielding bon viveur emerged from an enormous limousine and tottered towards his dressing room.
When he eventually meandered through the orchestra to reach the podium, several players were engulfed by passing alcohol fumes.
Fortunately the Wienerphilharmoniker know the score of Parsifal so well they can perform it without any input at all from a bibulous band leader.
Gergiev’s well-documented political sympathies are bad enough.
His contempt for both colleagues and audience, consistently unprofessional behaviour and towering Trumpian ego would disqualify him from running a puppet theatre in Pavlovka let alone being Grand Poobah of All Music in Tsar Vladimir’s Russia.
Both the Mariinsky and Bolshoi deserve a hell of a lot better.
He is untouchable !
As if anyone actually wanted to touch him…
The weird thing is that he simply can’t conduct.
never mind the details…
In Russia, arriving late is a subtle way to demonstrate power. He likes to show that his schedule is more valuable than the audience’s. I was working for a venue in Budapest which had Gergiev and Mariinsky several times prior the outbreak of the war, and for one occasion he stepped out of his hotel bathroom 7 minutes before the official beginning of the show. Not at the venue, in the hotel! He was playing with everyone’s nerves, except for his team which wasn’t bothered. He must have learned at the military how to dress up very quickly.
I have attended Gergiev’s performances in London and Athens and St Petersburg. He is a little chameleon-like adapting his behaviour to the persona he wants to project and psychology of the country and his conducting style changes dramatically. He pushes himself physically professionally and I have no doubt the State made demands on him on the occasion mentioned. Intervals are long in Russia anyway with long queues for champanskaya and Ikra, giving time to eat and drink. That the audience was not warned is not Gergiev’s responsibility but the Bolshoi’s front of house. It certainly was not a ‘comfort break’ for the Maestro.
And what do the Spaniards demonstrate? In Spain, “nothing happens on time”, George Orwell testified and I second that. BTW, I consulted a German company for 6 years and not a single meeting started on time. They were always at least 20 min late.
I would think that starting a meeting late and starting a concert late are two very different things. No concert I have ever played in Spain started late nor was the audience kept waiting. Having experienced this behavior from said conductor many times, I’m not surprised and only shows his lack of respect for anyone but himself.
Childish whataboutism.
Perhaps he was searching for his tooth pick.
At the musicians’ cafeteria at the Met Opera they would supply us with toothpicks. Every time he would come to conduct us we would fantasize about where we could hide them from him.
About the 1 million roubles certificate for the deceased in “ SVO” For those not familiar with the term “SVO” it stands for Special Military Operation, or War in Ukraine as we call it. Just making sure those who complain about cancelling artist with the morning “do not mix politics and culture”
he often has done this – most overrated musician around but there are many like his successor at the LSO for instance
What’s with the T-shirt!
An overrated cocktail stick waver in my opinion.
It’s good to be the King!
Stalin was known to bring pianist Maria Yudina into the recording studio after a concert if he liked what he heard on the radio to make private recordings for him. For this, Stalin let her recite poetry and speak about religion during the intermissions of her recitals. However she was never allowed to perform outside the Soviet bloc. I see this repeating itself. Gergiev has been a willing dupe for Putin during his time in office and has destroyed his reputation such that it is with this sort of stupidity. Rudeness toward the ticket holders at the Bolshoi is inexcusable.
My Italian gardener charged much more than anyone in the area, during the hours of work he incessantly chatted with my neighbour and smoked non stop. However, no one could get the garden look as great as he did even working longer hours…
That doesn’t really apply to Gergiev, who can barely read music.
When I attend one of his performances at St Petersburg I always book the night train back to Moscow leaving 02.00
He is ugly on the inside and out. Wretched human being.
I remember a concert at which the boot was on the other foot. It was a visit to London about 30 years ago by the Toronto Symphony Orchestra under their conductor at the time, Gunther Herbig. I seem to remember that the concert was to begin at 8:00 pm. The orchestra was on stage but at about five to eight, there was an announcement that ‘our honourable guests, the Duke and Duchess of X [I shall save them embarrassment] have been delayed so the concert will begin when they arrive’. After about fifteen minutes, their having still not arrived, someone in the audience whistled the Marseillaise. There was much applause! When the dignitaries condescended to appear about five minutes later, the concert began. Excellent performance, of course.
Just as everyone was seated after the interval, another announcement: ‘Would you all remain seated at the end until our honourable guests have departed’.
Needless to say, when it ended, and after a few moments of applause, with the honourable guests still there, there was a huge stampede to leave! Oh, I almost forgot to mention that the Duke did not make an announcement apologising for the delay and thanking the audience for their patience.
This left me wondering whether, if the Met Line had been delayed that night, as so often happens, could I have called the Barbican Hall and asked them to hang on until I arrived?
As deplorable a human being as he is a conductor.
My goodness, the sheer anger directed at Gergiev is astonishing. Thank God for slippedisc—without it, entirely different institutions might be burdened with managing the fallout from the rage pressurizing the minds of all those delicate souls – pure, innocent, and just.
A couple of observations come to mind. Some years ago, a young and promising conductor of Scandinavian descent arrived an hour late to one of the Southbank stages, where Nielsen’s Fourth Symphony was on the program. His excuse? He overslept. I don’t recall anyone rushing to connect his tardiness to his nationality, or to any of the grievances some here appear so preoccupied with. Instead, I remember the delight of the audience as he bounded onto the stage, his gait brimming with youthful energy.
And then there’s the famous tale of Arthur Rubinstein. Living practically next door to a London concert hall, he received a call at 7:30 informing him that the audience was waiting. Unperturbed, he grabbed his concert shoes, asked which program he was supposed to play, and strolled onto the stage moments later. Did this trigger an unbearable surge of collective fury? I think not.
So let’s drop this fixation on Gergiev’s lateness and whatever other grievances might be dredged up. And don’t bother trying to reason that these are “different cases.” They are not. In all these stories, the simple fact remains: the men were late. Nothing more, nothing less.
My dad was a cellist for 46 years in the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. When the orchestra unionized in 1962 strict time rules were applied to performances. If a rehearsal (not sure if this applied to concerts) ran 5 minutes over a predetermined time allotment (stop time), the players were paid for additional prorated hour of playing. Needless to say that kept things on time. On 2 occasions attending rehearsals I heard the stage manager call out “5 minutes” and the rehearsal ended in 5 minutes regardless of where the conductor was in their preparation (and these were not B team conductors!). The conductors who had the clearest grasp of the music they were conducting; who knew exactly what they expected from the players and managed time efficiently were the conductors most respected by the orchestra.
absolutely insane, which is why he’s one of my fave conductors.
He always looked bored and unkempt at his concerts in London, as if he had far more interesting things to do – resulting in boring, ‘unkempt’, disinterested performances. A self-indulgent musical prankster
his documentary was called “you cannot start without me”!!! Even way back then, this was the price to pay, for venues, for his family: he was directing the Bolshoi Ballet and the orchestras and guest conducting across Europe… i couldn’t watch the whole thing, too sad to see (especially for his kids)
I feel sorry for the front desks of strings – the stale T-shirt smell is unbearable. But at least it is not necessary to look at him.
Once at the Mariinsky I went backstage to see him during intermission. He was watching soccer during which we visited (I’d met him a few times).Time was passing and finally i said “I’d better get back to my seat.” He eventually returned to conduct.
« a song based on the poems of Maria Zakharova » seriously? What’s next, a « Passion according to Sergei Lavrov » ?