Gergiev at the Guangzhou Opera House

Three hundred Russians. Dozens of Chinese extras. One stage that stopped time. When the Mariinsky Theatre brought Prokofiev’s War and Peace to the Guangzhou Opera House, Radio 4’s Lauren Schofield declared it unlike anything she had heard in any opera house in the world. The following day, she sat down with Valery Gergiev—Artistic and General Director of the Mariinsky, and one of Classic FM’s top five greatest conductors alive—for a rare and revealing conversation.
A Hall That Earns Its Reputation
Gergiev praised the Guangzhou Opera House with a conductor’s precision, not a diplomat’s warmth. The chorus and voices sounded “not only clear but rich and strong.” He noted the adjustments he planned for the second night—repositioning orchestra sections to better understand the room. This is the language of craft. Having opened the National Centre for the Performing Arts in Beijing in 2007 and conducted across six Chinese cities since, Gergiev called Guangzhou “a very important next step.”
When asked whether the hall deserved the credit for that extraordinary sound, he shared it generously—with Prokofiev’s scoring, the Mariinsky’s singers, and the baritone who opened the opera with a voice so powerful, Gergiev said, “even if he was in a stadium you could hear him.”
Responsibility Over Prestige
Called the Tsar of Russian Opera, Gergiev neither embraced the title nor deflected it. “It’s an honor but also a risk,” he said quietly. “I prefer to stay as a modest conductor.” What followed was more telling: he thinks every day about whether he has used his remarkable collection of voices and musicians as well as they deserve. For him, the Mariinsky’s greatness is not a crown. It is a daily obligation.
The Philosophy of Repertoire
Gergiev believes in cycles—not single celebrated titles, but the full arc of a composer’s work. He spoke of Simon Boccanegra as a late revelation, an opera he once approached coolly and later found “shockingly, stunningly beautiful.” On whether Shostakovich and Prokofiev can compete with Verdi or Mozart, he was characteristically precise: they must be performed and brought around the world, because they are “absolutely, definitely very high quality music.” Competition, he suggested, is simply the wrong frame.
War and Peace After Forty Years
Four decades of conducting Prokofiev’s epic have shifted Gergiev’s focus. The grand choral finale—the celebration of victory—no longer moves him most. What does are the individuals: Natasha’s romantic devastation, Prince Andrei’s nobility, Pierre Bezukhov’s inner searching. “The most precious is in individuals,” he said. For Gergiev, War and Peace is not a historical pageant. It is a study in what conflict does to love, to marriage, to ordinary human life.
China’s Voice, Still to Come
Gergiev returned often to China’s artistic future. The great halls are already built. What matters now is filling them—with trained orchestras, choruses, opera companies of genuine ambition. He sees millions of gifted young musicians and a cultural sensibility distinct from anything European or American. The next great voice in world music, he implied, may speak in an entirely different tongue. “We live in a world of rich culture,” he said, “and this rich culture is rich because it has all these colors.”
The Mariinsky’s War and Peace in Guangzhou was a single night. The questions it opened—about legacy, about craft, about what China might yet offer the world—feel far less finite.