A friend (whose name I will protect from the Russian-Metropolitan music Mafia) writes from St. Leningrad: >Petersburg, as you had told us, is/was exquisitely beautiful. However, >there is a pallor of pessimism among its inhabitants--a definite aura of >hopelessness (unlike Moscow, which is full of energy and Tartar wildness). >Our concert at the Maryiinsky Theater was rather lackluster. Gergiev is >dour and his orchestra brutally overworked. He's a bit of a madman, I >think--obsessed and unrealistic in the manner of a dark Dostoyevskian >character. "Brutal" is the right word. I saw him at a rehearsal with his own orchestra and it was sickening. I don't think he'll do that with other orchestras, but being a competent-to-good conductor doesn't justify treating musicians like dirt. His betrayal of his mentor, Temirkanov, wasn't so nice either. Now, being a backstabbing brute doesn't necessarily take away from the performance (when I listen to Wagner, I usually don't ponder his biography) but Gergiev's excessive success reminds me of the stupid unfairness of Andrew Lloyd Webber's *former* commercial triumph over Sondheim. Are there not a dozen conductors around who would deserve Gergiev's riches much more? Janos Gereben/SF [log in to unmask]