Valery Gergiev receives the Order of Honour of Kuzbass

On 17 September the Mariinsky Theatre Symphony Orchestra gave a&bnsp;concert in the city of Kemerovo, where Valery Gergiev and the ensemble arrived from China. According to Siberian Business Portal, because of a&bnsp;delayed flight from China the musicians arrived in Kuzbass not at 2:30 as planned but at 6:00. The concert began half an hour later than planned, at 13:00. Valery Gergiev told the press that the daytime start of the concert had not been selected by chance: “We are performing here, at least – we could have flown above you for many, many years. We decided to change the programme when the tragedy in the Krasnodar Region occurred. We included Krymsk. Other places were cancelled – among them Sochi. Then another town was included – Lipetsk. The tour map was entirely different.”

Valery Gergiev came to Kuzbass on the initiative of Aman Tuleyev, while the concert itself commemorated seventy years since the region’s founding.
As Siberian Business Portal reported, maestro Gergiev began his latest visit to the region with a return – he was here once before, as a&bnsp;student of the Conservatoire in 1976. The Sverdlovsk Philharmonic sent the young conductor on his first ever tour. At that time, Gergiev visited Chelyabinsk, Kisilevsk, Novokuznetsk and Kemerovo. “I wanted to come because I remember this beautiful city, the park where we performed and the mighty banks of the River Tom,” the musician said.
The concert by the Mariinsky Theatre Symphony Orchestra at the Philharmonic Hall in Kemerovo, which included works by Mendelssohn, Tchaikovsky and Wagner, lasted just over an hour. After the concert the musicians departed for Tomsk where an evening performance brought to a&bnsp;close the Symphony Orchestra and Valery Gergiev’s September tour, incredible in terms of the distances travelled and the number of concerts given.