Safe is Not a Compliment

Last night on PBS there was a show about Russian conductor Valery Gergiev, head of the Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg (formerly the legendary Kirov) as well as principal conductor for the London Symphony Orchestra and others. I was pleasantly surprised to realize that he also conducted the orchestra for the Metropolitan Opera's staging of Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin, featuring the stellar Renée Fleming, which my dad and I saw in the spring of last year. Now I wish I'd been paying more attention to the orchestration.

Gergiev is a perpetually grizzled and sweaty conductor of fifty-five and a virtual rock-star of the modern classical music world. His schedule is insane: he conducts nearly a gig a day (though I suspect that the intelligentsia do not refer to classical music concerts as "gigs"), indicating that he is constantly in high demand, and he dedicates fantastic amounts of energy to each. The stereotype of the wild-haired maestro who looks like he's about to give himself an aneurysm from his furious baton-waving is fully expressed in the person of Valery Gergiev. He grits his teeth and swings his huge hands to and fro, with his distinctive bangs quivering below his bald scalp, then squints and forms his mouth into a cooing shape as he delicately guides the orchestra into a more placid section, as if in rapture at the divine beauty of the sounds he is indirectly creating.



I know too little about twentieth-century classical music, or even about the idiosyncrasies of individual conductors, to say "Oh, well, he's better than Salonen but inferior to Bernstein" with any kind of authority, but even I could tell that Gergiev's music was fantastic--and I'm not just going off of the fact that he was considered enough of a legend to be featured on "Great Performances." This was some great classical music. His performers raved about his ability to hear anything, to labor patiently at minutiae, to connect with the orchestra and the audience. Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, a piece with which I have (surprisingly) a passing familiarity, was shown at various stages of development under Gergiev's Fearless Leadership, from first rehearsal to performance, and it was apparent that the work had gelled marvelously in his hands. Even with my old TV's decidedly sub-perfect sound quality, I felt my spine tingling as they moved through the famous, dramatic, explosively arrhythmic sections.

Perhaps most interesting to me, being as I am a non-classical musician and a member of the Great Unwashed, were Gergiev's more generally applicable comments about music. "Modern orchestras are generally very good," he said, and I am paraphrasing, "but that is not the same as interesting." (An analysis which could easily be applied to many bluegrass or rock bands.) "They can play well enough that everyone agrees they are very good--but that is playing safely, and safe is not always a compliment."