Valery Gergiev and the Kirov: A Story of Survival.(Review)

Valery Gergiev and the Kirov: A Story of Survival by John Ardoin Foreword by Peter Ustinov Amadeus Press, 352pp. $34.95

The late John Ardoin, longtime music critic for the Dallas Morning News and writer of books about Maria Callas and Wilhelm Furtwangler, died last March, shortly after finishing this rather adroit combination of immediate journal and extensive history. As the title indicates, Ardoin dealt with both a person and an institution: the now-forty-eight-year-old conductor Valery Gergiev, and St. Petersburg's 218-year-old Mariinsky Theatre (renamed during the Soviet era as the Kirov Theater of Leningrad to honor a political official). Ardoin might indeed have tried to write two separate volumes: one centered on the full 1995-96 season he spent day-to-day with Gergiev in St. Petersburg and on the conductor's tours; the other a detailed account of the birth-pangs, development, glories, downturns and present struggles of the historic theater of ballet and opera. Or he might have made his double task an outsize book with two distinct halves.

What he accomplished instead was a feat of literary courage and clever balance. The present book's structure alternates chapters detailing Ardoin's Gergiev year with a fairly careful and generously informative, if not quite factually perfect, history of Russia's pre-eminent opera-and-dance theater (and dance school). And fascinatingly, as the history's decades march up to the present, and as the year with Gergiev proceeds, largely by way of conversations with Tsar Valery himself, Gergiev's story and the Mariinsky--Kirov history finally merge into one narrative, as the present account becomes a prognosis for the future of the musician and his theater.

Although admiration for both the theater and its artistic director is the spine of Ardoin's book, this is by no means a puff project. The history is checkered, to say the least, right up to the months when ...