Valéry Gergiev

“The composer and Gergiev both drive their forces hard. The brittle, burlesquing orchestra sounds fine.” The Times, 6th June 2009 ***

“Valery Gergiev perfectly catches the grotesqueries and acerbic satire of the work, based upon Gogol's short story. The vividness of the recording catches all the raw-edged detail of a score that amalgamates a range of modernist influences against a background of Rimsky-Korsakov's final opera, The Golden Cockerel, and Gergiev revels in its youthful exuberance. With a cast of some 70 named characters, it's a perfect work for a company like the Mariinsky.” The Guardian, 5th June 2009 *****

“Recorded under studio conditions in the Mariinsky’s brand new concert hall, this version is notable for the brilliance of the orchestra’s playing and the idiomatic delivery of the Gogol-based text by a new generation of Mariinsky voices. Both Vladislav Sulimsky as the noseless collegiate assessor, Kovalev, and Sergei Semishkur as his errant appendage perform with panache.” Sunday Times, 31st May 2009 ****

“…Gergiev… wrings superb playing from his band, bringing real panache to the rapid alternations of contrast and grotesquerie and to the brilliantly inventive interludes. Vladislav Sulimsky as Kovalev is powerfully charismatic, on a par with Eduard Akimov in Rozhdestvensky's recording for characterisation and outdoing him in vocal beauty; he really holds the production together. ...all the vocal principals communicate utter insane conviction in the surreal, even Kafkaesque, world of Gogols story. ...the recorded sound is absolutely superb in its crystal clarity and depth...” BBC Music Magazine, July 2009 *****

“Gergiev and his soloists give a scrupulously prepared account of the dauntingly rebarbative score, finding a suavity, euphony and poise that are anything but readily accessible.” Gramophone Magazine, August 2009

“As a concert venue St Paul's Cathedral's problems remain acute: chief culprit is the building's notorious nine-second reverberation period which gives climaxes earth-shattering power but reduces inner detail to mush.
In these circumstances the conductor's role is mainly one of damage limitation. Not that Gergiev chooses sluggish tempi to palliate the acoustics. Indeed he tends to plough on as precipitately as ever at section ends. Not for him the grand but apocryphal slowing into the first movement recapitulation as favoured by Bern- stein et al. Some exaggerated enunciation by the far-flung choral groups is presumably designed to maximise audibility. Meanwhile most of the soloists proffer Mariinsky German in vaguely Verdian style and the ladies aren't always in tune. James Mallinson and his sound team do their best with the microphones, ensuring that unique moments such as the stratospheric apparition of the Mater Gloriosa are captured for posterity. There's a more than usually sweettoned sentimentality about much of Part 2.
Belying the thrills and spills of an event in which many of the performers will have been unable to hear each other or catch much more than a glimpse of their maestro, the final Chorus Mysticus brings a real sense of gravitas and uplift. The massed voices are wonderfully hushed at the start even if the offstage trumpets register less impressively at the close (everyone sounds offstage at St Paul's). Whether this is a tribute to Gergiev's sense of the dramatic, the professionalism of his assembled artistes or sheer good luck is difficult to tell.
Shorn of applause, the reading is neatly accommodated on a single hybrid SACD and makes an appropriately idiosyncratic climax to a controversial cycle. The packaging, quite sumptuous for a bargain issue, has full texts and translations.” Gramophone Classical Music Guide, 2010

“at once the most ambitious and the most impressive in Gergiev's variable Mahler series...The atmosphere of a great occasion is caught admirably, with the timpani and organ very impressive...A most competitive version.” Penguin Guide, 2010 ***

“Singing without scores, the London Symphony Chorus are on unambiguous great form. Once Gergiev has the bit between his teeth, the tension hardly lets up…” Gramophone Magazine, March 2009

“I've never heard the opening Pan Awakes music more marvellously vivid in all its miraculous scoring, every dynamic in place, the snarl of the trombones, the menace of the trumpets ... you won't hear more brilliant playing than the LSO's” Sunday Times

“The first and third movements climax in a dash to the finishing-line that has one pinned to one's seat. The finale has an immediacy and machismo you may or may not find at odds with its elevated spiritual character.” Gramophone Magazine, January 2009

“intensely theatrical...The sharp dynamic contrasts are well brought out in the first movement, with all the colourful woodwind writing well highlighted and pointed...[Larsson] is very expressive and beautifully supported by the orchestra.” Penguin Guide, 2010 **/*

“a performance of the Seventh Symphony as cohesive and powerful as I can remember. This was a blinder from start to finish …” Financial Times **** (concert review)

“In glossing over the leering monsters of this gilt ballroom of sound, Gergiev finds a more or less cohesive - if not always satisfying - epic thread, although the central Scherzo still rebels. Gergiev and a lively LSO sweep up the finale bells and whistles with exhilarating energy.” The Times, 26th July 2008 ****

“Valery Gergiev treats [the Seventh Symphony] as an exercise in orchestral virtuosity that primarily strives for effect rather than attempting to explore underlying substance. It's thrillingly played, but Gergiev's speeds are at times self-consciously extreme. A sense of garbled excitement pervades the outer movements, which could do with more consideration and shape. The morbid central scherzo and the two nocturnes that frame it are more adroitly done: the second nocturne is sexy as well as ironic, which makes it very unsettling.” The Guardian, 8th August 2008 ***

“Right from the start, with those dark, dragging rhythms, there's a sense that something special is afoot here. Driven and grittily intense though his direction often is, it isn't ruthless. …I can't think of another recording of this symphony that not only brings so many of its extraordinary features to life, but ultimately balances them so satisfyingly.” BBC Music Magazine, September 2008 *****

“Valery Gergiev's dark, pumped-up Seventh might prove to be the high-light of the cycle … it holds in tight unity a score that can sprawl into incoherence.The playing is consistently assured; the sound powerfully immediate” Gramophone Magazine, October 2008

“For some Valery Gergiev's dark, pumped-up Seventh might prove to be the high-point of his Mahler cycle. True, the over-the-barricades manner precludes much in the way of subtlety but it does hold in tight unity a score that can sprawl into incoherence. Much is paced a notch faster than usual, though not the introduction which is spacious and strong. The playing is consistently assured; the sound powerfully immediate. The reading has a monolithic drive that is nothing if not distinctive.
What Gergiev doesn't deliver is a sense of this music's teeming inner life. No point looking here for either Claudio Abbado's delicate attention to line and colour or Leonard Bernstein's emotive, micro-managed rubato. Gergiev's inner movements come across as diligent but brusque.
While his idiosyncratic seating arrangements (including antiphonal violins) make for some interesting effects, it's the resilience of the LSO brass at high decibels you're likely to remember, not the meaningful interplay of independent and interdependent strands.
The applause which greeted this performance at London's Barbican Hall has been surgically removed for this hybrid SACD incarnation.
The critics will be as divided over its merits as they were following the live performance.
Happily, LSO Live's competitive pricing means you can decide for yourself.” Gramophone Classical Music Guide, 2010

“Gergiev’s Mahler cycle at the Barbican has been accused of excess – as if in Mahler’s, of all music, that were necessarily a crime. Certainly, everything here tends to be taken to extremes: the lovely vernal freshness of the first movement’s main theme, the oppressive heat at the start of its development section, the scherzo’s hint of menace, the trio’s of eeriness, the slow movement’s macabre humour, the finale’s nightmarish violence and the passionate tenderness of its dream of remembered happiness. The result, with the LSO playing with marvellous expressiveness and energy, is irresistible, at once disciplined and joyfully spontaneous.” Sunday Times, 18th May 2008 ****

“"a riveting performance … vital, reckless and thrilling …one of the most exciting things I've heard from the LSO"” Independent on Sunday

“Not since Bernstein have we encountered a Mahler conductor of such idiosyncrasy and fire as Valery Gergiev. …right from the very first vividly characterised sounds of nature, every detail has been thought about and felt… an electrifying account of the stormy finale...” BBC Music Magazine, Proms 2008 ****

“Not since Bernstein have we encountered a Mahler conductor of such idiosyncrasy and fire.” BBC Music Magazine, September 2008

“a Mahler First that's packed with heightened drama, fastidious detail and mint-fresh playing from the LSO … it has a springy, innocent crispness that the conductor deftly balances with a nightmarish vision in the finale” Classic FM Magazine

“an exercise in barely suppressed hysteria, brilliantly illuminated by the LSO woodwinds. Most conductors permit a sense of spatial grandeur as the close approaches. Gergiev was unremitting; aggression and dissonance held the stage at the every end. If you like your Mahler visceral, spine-tingling and dangerous, this was for you … the LSO are certainly playing out of their skins for Gergiev” The Guardian

“extrovert and flamboyant, with plenty of drama, particularly in the outer movements.” Penguin Guide, 2010 **/*

“Gergiev’s tempo for the first movement was at the cutting edge of impetuous ... the sinew and defiance pinned you to the seat ... Gergiev’s neurotic manner was entirely at one with Mahler's. The playing was mighty and valiant with the LSO brass covering themselves in glory.” The Independent

“it is difficult to resist Valery Gergiev in full flow. He summons such reserves of power and commitment from the LSO that one cannot help but be swept along.” Gramophone Magazine

“Valery Gergiev is one of the most charismatic maestros on the circuit and his Mahler series in London has aroused passionately divergent responses. If you prize the textural elucidation that Claudio Abbado brings to these scores you probably won't care for Gergiev's broader, coarser brush. The raw excitement he engenders may seem beside the point.
This Sixth is dark, sometimes impenetrable, an impression offset only by a raft of sublime pianissimi. The silken shimmer of the first movement's central pastoral reverie with cowbells carefully distanced offers surprising relief.
Elsewhere Gergiev drives the argument forward with the kind of sullen, monolithic power he applies to Shostakovich at his most barren.
While his main tempo is only fractionally faster than Bernstein's, it seems rushed even for this most neurotic of symphonic openers. The exposition repeat is taken. The serene Andantemoderato, placed second as is now the fashion, is soon being harried towards a climax that blares unmercifully. There's more variety of tone in the Scherzo, though it's the finale which really hits home, the orchestra whipped into a frenzy that may or may not be idiomatic but certainly strikes sparks.
If you're looking for a quick-fire, single-disc Sixth with a difference, Gergiev has more gravitas than previous Soviet-trained conductors, even when he's racing. LSO Live backs him up with an impactful, immediate, rather airless sound encoded as a hybrid SACD. The bright-edged, multi-linear treatment favoured by exponents as ostensibly dissimilar as Bernstein and Boulez simply isn't on Gergiev's agenda. Instead, a trail is blazed for a visceral, even thuggish brand of music-making. Yes, these sounds thrilled many in the hall but would you want to revisit them at home? At bargain price you can afford to find out.
The enthusiastic applause has been removed.” Gramophone Classical Music Guide, 2010

“Gergiev's approach to Mahler's Sixth is bold and dramatic and his performance has a total conviction not always apparent in his controversial cycle...He goes for an almost brutish energy in this dark symphony of Mahler, and the results are compelling.” Penguin Guide, 2010 ***